escape from farmageddon · for most of us, losing a pet amounts to a death in the family. our...

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Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine

200 Westboro RoadNorth Grafton, ma 01536www.tufts.edu/vet

Maga ZiNe of the cUMMiNgS School of ve ter iNary Medic iNe spring 2012 VOL . 13 nspring 2012 VOL . 13 nO. 2O. 2

veterinary medicine

On the FlyMichael McEwan, V14, photographed this dragonfly while walking his dog along the Charles river in newton, Mass. “That area is the closest thing to an outdoor hike [for us],” says McEwan. His image was among the 130 photographs submitted by Cummings school students, faculty and staff for an annual contest sponsored by the student organization WAZE (Wildlife, Aquatics, Zoo, Exotics). see more online at go.tufts.edu/wildthings.

escape from Farmageddon

Why this little goat needs to stick around for a while

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c a s e s o lv e d

For more information

please contact Tufts’

Gift Planning Office

888.748.8387

giftplanning@ tufts.edu

www.tufts.edu/giftplanning

Give BackGive Back& AheadLook

More than 30 years ago, John Gacher (right) and Federico Santi found a tiny, flea-covered kitten in a dumpster, brought her home, and gave her a bath. “She fell asleep on my pillow, purring so loudly,” says Federico. that kitten, whom they named Kitty, lived to be more than 20 years old. after she passed away, they were reluctant to think about adopting again. eventually, they decided to rescue another cat, Special K, who now has the run of their antiques store, the drawing room, in newport, ri.

John and Federico’s love of animals led them to the cummings School of Veterinary Medicine. they have included the school in their estate plans and their gift will support student scholarships. “We want to have a long-range impact on animals,” says John. “What better way to do that than to support education for veterinarians?”

“We can help future veterinarians.”

Resurrection

Barley reclaimed one of his nine lives late one night in the Tufts emergency room.

The 6-year-old cat arrived at the Foster Hospital in pretty serious shape: whimpering in pain, not eating or drinking, unable to walk without a wobble. His owners, Daniel plante and Elizabeth Hughes of Worcester, Mass., were plenty worried.

Barley’s rock-hard bladder made it clear he was suffering from a life-threatening urinary blockage, which is most common in young to middle-aged male cats. if not treated quickly, a cat can die from a ruptured bladder or from toxins in the bloodstream. The Foster Hospital Er sees up to 20 such cases a month. symptoms include frequent trips to the litter box, crying in pain, not eating and blood in the urine—things most owners mistake for constipation.

Kathleen Lindsey, the Er intern who diagnosed Barley’s block-age, said blood tests showed that the cat’s kidneys were flooding his system with excess potassium, resulting in a depressed heart rate. Barley received iV fluids to flush the toxins and increase his heart rate.

There was another scary moment when Lindsey told the couple that Barley had died, recalls Hughes. “she paused for what seemed like an eternity before adding, ‘But we brought him back.’ ” The cat’s heart had started beating so irregularly that it couldn’t push blood through the body. “Barley fell over and went into cardiac arrest,” says John Anastasio, the Er resident who resuscitated him.

now fully recovered, the feisty feline has resumed his favorite activity—swatting at water running from the faucet. The couple still marvels at how close they came to losing him. “it became life-threatening so fast,” says Hughes. “i am so very grateful this hospital was close to us.” —Genevieve Rajewski

photo: aloNSo NicholS

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contents

departments

2 FromtheDean

3 upFrontP E O P L E , P L AC E S & A N I M A L S

30 onCampusC U M M I N G S S C H O O L N E W S

32 researCht H E PAt H t O d I S C Ov E ry

34 aDvanCementG I v I N G . G r O W t H . G r At I t U d E .

36 asKthevetk E E P I N G Ly M E I N C H E C k

S PS P rr I N G 2 0 1 2 I N G 2 0 1 2 vv O L U M EO L U M E 1 3 N O 1 3 N O . 2. 2

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features6 IntheCompanyofanimals

After 25 years in practice as a human surgeon in New York City, Jim Grillo, V05, discovered it was really all happening at the zoo. By Bruce Morgan

12 LifelinesFor most of us, losing a pet amounts to a death in the family. Our veterinary students can help you work through your grief. Just pick up the phone.By Genevieve Rajewski

C Ov E r S t O ry

16 escapefromFarmageddonWhy it’s important to keep a piebald sheep named for Jacob in the Old Testament and other endangered breeds of livestock around for the next couple of centuries. By Genevieve Rajewski

22 WipedoutA disease you’ve probably never heard of destroyed cattle, starved millions and brought down empires before Tufts veterinarians vanquished it from the face of the earth. By Michael Blanding

26 president’ssymposiumA meeting of Tufts minds on kids’ mental and physical development illustrates the power of a multidisciplinary approach to problem-solving. And, yes, there is a veterinarian among them.

On the cover: dale, one of a few hundred Arapawa goats left in the world, has some of her embryos on ice to preserve her breed for a good long time. Photograph by Alonso Nichols

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f r o m t h e d e a n

veterinarymedicine

deborah turner kochevar, d.v.m., ph.d.dean and henry and lois foster professor

tufts Prints GreenPrinted on 25% post-consumer waste recycled paper. Please recycle.

i first met herman at the henry and lois foster hospital for Small Animals. He was a handsome, homeless fellow—outgoing and engaging, with a low, throaty voice—and had fully recuper-ated from the injuries that had brought him to our hospital. His only social challenge was the tendency to drool when he was happy, which was most of the time. It wasn’t long before Herman came to live with my family.

Herman returned to the hospital recently for specialty care from one of our newest services, veterinary dentistry, and had an infected tooth extracted. The Foster Hospital is a referral hospital,

meaning that the majority of our patients already have been seen by a primary-care veteri-narian who has recommended further evaluation by a specialist.

Located 45 minutes west of Boston on the campus of the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine in Grafton, the Foster Hospital provides 24-hour care for more than 25,000 pets each year. Nearly 100 students and 50 interns and residents assist our faculty and staff—more than 100 strong—in managing the hospital’s clinical-care specialties, including internal medicine, surgery, medical and radiation oncology, cardiology, dentistry, pain management, neurology, ophthalmology, diagnostic imaging, emergency and critical care, behavior, anesthesiology and companion zoological medicine.

We’ve certainly come a long way since the hospital opened in 1985, with an annual case-load that has more than doubled. Our caseload for dogs, cats like Herman and zoological companion animals has grown, as has the cadre of students, interns and residents who care for and learn from them.

In addition to providing exceptional care for our patients today, our faculty, students and staff are also invested in advancing veterinary medicine through clinical, translational and basic science research. Our veterinarians conduct clinical trials, just as physicians do in academic medical centers, to broaden our understanding of disease. This important work could lead to new diagnostics, treatments and preventive therapies so that patients like Herman will continue to receive top-flight care well into the future.

The Foster Hospital for Small Animals is literally brimming with our expanding ani-mal care, education and research enterprise. To enable the Cummings School to meet the growing needs of our clients and their pets, we have developed a vision and a master plan to renovate and expand the Foster Hospital. This transformative project will reduce anxiety for patients and their owners as well as create, over the long term, more dedicated space for patient care, clinical trials and student learning. The first phase of the project will centralize the hospital’s outpatient functions, expand reception areas for our clients, provide a sepa-rate entry for emergencies, create new bereavement space for owners and add an ultrasound suite and examination rooms.

I invite you to learn more about the project by visiting go.tufts.edu/fosterhospital. We hope you will join us in making this ambitious plan a reality so we can continue to provide outstanding care for companion animals.

Sincerely,

aCommitmentto 5-starpatientCare

vO L . 13 , N O . 2vO L . 13 , N O . 2 SPr I NG 2012

Executive EditorExecutive EditorDeborah T. Kochevar, Dean Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine

EditorEditorGenevieve Rajewski

Editorial dEditorial directorirectorKaren Bailey

design ddesign directorirectorMargot Grisar

ddesignesign2COMMUNIQUÉ

Contributing WritersContributing WritersMichael Blanding, Laura Ferguson, Bruce Morgan

Staff PhotographersStaff PhotographersAlonso NicholsKelvin Ma

Contributing EditorContributing EditorBob Sprague

Editorial AdvisorsEditorial AdvisorsJonathan Burton, Interim Director Veterinary Development and Alumni Relations

Lorraine Daignault, Marketing Manager

Tom Keppeler, Associate Director of Communications

Joe McManus, Executive Associate Dean

Virginia Rentko, Medical Director Foster Hospital for Small Animalsand Hospital for Large Animals

Tufts Veterinary Medicine is funded in part by the Edward Hyde Cox Fund for Publications. It is distributed to alumni, friends, veterinary students, veterinarians and key university personnel.

We welcome your letters, story ideas and suggestions. Send correspondence to: Genevieve Rajewski, EditorTufts Veterinary MedicineTufts UniversityCummings School of Veterinary Medicine 200 Westboro RoadNorth Grafton, MA 01536 or email: [email protected]

The Cummings School’s website is www.tufts.edu/vetThe telephone number is 508.839.5302.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

2 t u f t s ve t e r i na ry m e d i c i n e s p r i n g 2 0 1 2

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upfrontpeople, places & animals

egislation on animal welfare issues is perennial ballot-box fare. In 2008, California passed Proposition 2, requiring that egg-laying hens, pregnant pigs and calves raised for veal be housed so they can lie down and move around freely. That same

year, Massachusetts outlawed greyhound racing. And in 2010, Missouri voters opted to regulate large-scale commercial breeding facilities for dogs and cats.

“Veterinarians have a unique responsibility to be advocates for animal wel-fare,” says Katherine Lambden, V14. “Being able to assess animal welfare scien-tifically, from basic husbandry and behavior to health, is a crucial part of that,” she notes. “That’s not part of the curriculum at most veterinary schools.” Of the nation’s 28 veterinary schools, just four, Tufts among them, have courses or rotations devoted to animal welfare, according to an audit conducted by Tufts’ Center for Animals and Public Policy several years ago.

So when Lambden learned about a Michigan State University competition

that aims to educate students about the welfare of animals used for food or com-panionship, she saw an opportunity for Tufts students to expand their repertoire. Through case studies, participating student teams compare an animal’s well-being in one scenario versus another. They pres-ent their findings to an expert scientist or veterinarian.

The Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine had never fielded a team for the MSU Animal Welfare Judging/Assessment Contest. Some of the competing schools conduct rigorous tryouts, and their teams

From parakeets to pigs, veterinary students seed their interest in animal welfare issues

Livestock production manager Garth Miller helps katherine Lambden, v14, center, and Brittany Pereira, v15, learn more about yorkshire pigs for the animal welfare contest.

theadvocates

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u p f r o n t

are mentored by veteran faculty coaches. To make things even more challenging, the Tufts students had just six weeks to pre-pare for the two-day competition, held in November 2011.

Lambden was undeterred.The scenarios for the 2011 contest

involved the care of dairy cows, pigs, race-horses and parakeets, so she recruited the Tufts team from student clubs devoted to related areas of veterinary medicine. Nine students began meeting three days a week to research the animals they would encoun-ter at the competition. They learned, for example, that parakeets are flock animals and thus happier when kept in pairs, as well as how to assess a breeding sow’s behavior to determine her stress level.

Despite hours and hours the students devoted to prepping for the contest, the

team was not sure it could afford to travel to East Lansing, Mich., to compete. They got lucky. The American Veterinary Medical Association funded six $500 travel scholarships, and the Cummings School picked up the tab for an additional $500 in travel expenses. Caroline Bodi, V15, Laura Kielbasa, V14, and Anna Novakowski, V15, decided they would help the team get ready for the contest, but stay behind. So Team Tufts included Lambden, Charles Byrd, V14, Brittany Pereira, V15, Jennifer Rudnick, V14, Serena Sutka, V14, and Elizabeth Topliff, V14.

Although Tufts placed seventh out of the nine teams that entered, the students did not come home empty-handed. One of the judges, Temple Grandin, nationally known for her work in livestock behav-ior and the design of humane slaughter

facilities, accepted the students’ invita-tion to speak at the Cummings School. She plans to visit the Grafton campus on August 29 and 30. (For more information, contact the school’s Office of Continuing Education at 508.887.4723.)

The school will continue to support a Tufts team at the annual animal wel-fare contest. Preparing to compete will complement other school-based opportu-nities for students to broaden their exper-tise in animal ethics and welfare, says Allen Rutberg, director of the Tufts Center for Animals and Public Policy.

The Cummings School recently ampli-fied its offerings and extracurricular activi-ties in these areas as a result of “the initia-tive and hard work of Katie [Lambden] and her colleagues,” Rutberg says.

—genevieve rajewski

ILLUSTRATION: WARD SCHUMAKER

ANIMAL-CArE APP. With one swipe on your smartphone, the Pet Tech PetSaver app ($4.99, pettech.net) gives you instant access to your animal’s medical records and locates the nearest vet-erinary ER. You can also scroll through an alphabetical list of poisonous plants (with photos for easy identification), get reminders of your pet’s medications and dosages, and even follow audio step-by-step instructions on first-aid or CPR in case your pet has an emergency and you’re not near a veteri-nary clinic.

FINdING FIdO. If your pet goes missing, a digital ID tag could ensure a quick reunion. The Flexi PCID Tag ($14.99, flexi.com) allows anyone who finds your animal to untwist the water- and shockproof cap and plug in a USB flash drive to access your contact information. The digital ID also stores information about your pet’s temperament and medical conditions.

CAt SCANS. Two ID tags feature a Quick Response (QR) code that you can scan and read with a smartphone. The Pet QR Tag ($14.95, petqrtag.com) allows owners to include con-tact information and details on a pet’s breed, sex, age, dietary

needs, veterinary clinic and temperament. The SmartLink Tag ($12.95, pethub.com) not only provides your contact information and details about your pet, it also will broadcast a missing-pet alert on social media, such as Facebook and via the PetHub community, which includes animal shelters.

rOAMING rOvErS. A lightweight device that looks like a wristwatch and attaches to your pet’s collar, the TAGG pet tracker ($199.95, tagg.com) uses GPS to keep tabs on your pet’s whereabouts, 24/7. —arden moore

Arden Moore is the editor of Catnip: The Newsletter for Caring Cat Owners, published by the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine. This article is adapted with permission. For subscription information, go to www.tuftscatnip.com or call 1.800.829.0926.

techtalkdigital devices to help you keep your pet healthy and safe

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s p r i n g 2 0 1 2 t u f t s ve t e r i na ry m e d i c i n e 5ILLUSTRATION: JON CANNELL

Man vs. Wild: Kitchen edition

diet plays an important role in the care of injured or sick wild animals, just as it does in human health.

“Extremely stressed animals especially require proper nutrition, and they also have to be eating in order to administer many medications,” says karen donahue, a tech-nician at the tufts Wildlife Clinic.

But when you treat ailing eagles, sickly snakes and baby bunnies on any given day—and none has an appointment—meal prep for all manner of picky eaters can get complicated. Last year, the Wildlife Clinic tended to, and fed, more than 2,000 animals brought in by good Samaritans, government agencies and nonprofits that rescue or study wildlife.

the clinic larder is spacious and well-stocked—from whole prey to feed coyotes to grape jelly for Baltimore Orioles—thanks to a donation that helped quadruple the size of the kitchen in the Bernice Barbour Wildlife Medicine Building. rebecca Potter and Sterling torrance made the graduation gift in honor of their son, Brendan torrance, v11, and his wife, Mikaela Mueller, v11.

So what’s on the menu? A cornucopia of cuisine—some found in your pantry and fridge; others not so much. A word of advice to would-be wildlife chefs: Leave this kind of meal prep to the professionals.

—genevieve rajewski

o V e r h e a r d

“One thing that people shouldn’t expect is for their dog to sit, as we do, in front of the TV and stare at the screen for hours and hours. It’s more of a backdrop.”

—tufts animal behaviorist nicholas dodman in a bloomberg businessweek story about dog tv, the new cable channel for canine viewers, for which he is an advisor

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t

After 25 years as a human surgeon, Jim Grillo returned to his first love

the doctor is on his way, but his patients appear not to notice.

They are too busy grunting, clucking, slithering, lolling on their

sides, hopping from perch to perch or stamping their huge feet. Some

are quite sick; others are recovering nicely from injury or illness.

Some are in a nasty mood. Others raise their heads as the man in

khakis, a stethoscope dangling from his neck, draws near. He treats

them all the same, with a deft, compassionate touch punctuated by

a medley of soft, soothing sounds.

As he makes his rounds at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans,

Jim Grillo, V05, is a man in his element. The zoo, which has about

1,500 animals living on 58 acres, is known for its strength in tropical

species, naturally suited to the zoo’s park-like terrain, graced with

stands of live oaks and dangling Spanish moss. The 63-year-old

Grillo is one of three full-time vets working here.

Jim Grillo, V05, greets Daphne, a 25-year-old tapir with a touch of arthritis.

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By Bruce MorganPhotograPhs by alonso nichols

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He radiates an easy, unassuming man-ner that must have served him well during the 25 years when his patients were human and he was a head and neck surgeon in New York City—before he made his dramatic mid-life shift into veterinary medicine. He’s not the stereotypical human surgeon who powers his way forward by sheer force of personality. Rather, this doctor slips up on you unexpectedly, without fanfare. “Uh, hello,” he says quietly, glancing down. Grillo is of medium height. He has gentle brown eyes. Like sunlight and water, he is suited to this animal kingdom.

Two powerfully coiled Bengal tigers await us at the first stop on his rounds. Grillo makes clucking sounds to them. “Who’s my boy? Who’s my big boy?” he says to the nearest cat. The tiger responds with a low, throaty sound known as “chuffing,” indicat-ing contentment, Grillo says. Neither tiger needs medical attention today.

Next door, an Indonesian pig called a babirusa, with small, tightly curved tusks on either side of the snout, instinctively f lops down to have her back stroked as Grillo approaches. “She’s kind of shy,” he notes as he caresses the pig through the bars while murmuring again and again, “Who’s my girl, who’s my girl, who’s my good girl?”

Droppings the size of grapefruit dot the floor of the giant shed leading to the next consultation. Two elephants stand side by side in the open air, tended by a young woman staffer. One is 48 years old, the other 39. They have been together for more than three decades. Grillo leans on the enclosure fence, beaming with pleasure at the pair before entering to examine them. As one elephant lifts a giant foot for his inspection, it occurs to me—strangely, but also obviously—that these patients can’t talk. If they have been hurt, they can’t say how. If they feel pain, they can’t say where. This makes treat-ment something of a guessing game, but there’s also a positive side to the animals’ muteness. “They can’t lie to you,” says the doctor with a rakish grin.

Because animals can’t supply direct information, Grillo notes, they have to be observed closely for any behavioral changes. A sudden slackening of appetite,

or a hitch in an animal’s stride, may be sig-nificant. “That’s why I like to be out with the animals as much as I can,” he says. And that’s why at each stop along this morning’s tour, he is careful to check with the staffers on site for news of what they have noticed lately among the animals in their care.

Some animals give up their medical his-tory more easily than others. A male rhi-noceros, for example, is utterly unfazed by the concerted clapping and calling of Grillo and a staffer who are determined to get the huge, armor-clad animal to swing toward them for a quick examination. Eventually, the beast gazes at them, or somewhat toward them. This rhino appears to be doing fine. A second rhino, a female, recently had one of her horns knocked off—how, exactly, no one knows—and Grillo has treated the site of the injury. “She’s recovering nicely,” he says, after examining the spot and patting her lightly on the head.

Minutes later, we visit Daphne, a tapir that Gril lo characterizes, only part ly tongue-in-cheek, as “one of my long-term relationships.” Daphne is lying on her side in a compact, grassy fenced area. She is 25 years old, somewhat arthritic in her late middle age, and suffered a toe infection that required daily treatment for about a year. Grillo approaches her with a wide grin. “Been awhile, Daphne, been awhile,” he murmurs before dropping to his knees beside her and hugging her around the neck. “Hey, my sweetie,” he says.

Daphne’s eyes get squinty and her head rears back as he strokes her belly—classic signs of pleasure in a tapir, according to a young staffer standing nearby. Animals with chronic conditions tend to be the ones that Grillo gets to know best and form the strongest attachments to, simply because of the duration of the link. “You get to love them,” the doc explains. “Daphne had us all worried for a while.”

There is something unaccountable about animals, something that makes us care for them beyond limit. Grillo taps into this dimension when he talks about animals and the “mystical” quality they embody for him. He has enjoyed being near them throughout his life. “I do have the most amazing job,” he says. “There’s nothing better than doing this.”

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Clockwise, from left: the wizened stare of Panya, an Asian elephant; a crested curassow, a bird native to northern South America; veterinarian Jim Grillo conducts an ultrasound on a Fiji Island iguana during his morning rounds at the Audubon Zoo.

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course correctionGrillo’s path to zoo work made a crooked line. After he completed medical school at Dartmouth, he entered surgical residency at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. On his first day in New York, he ventured over to the Bronx Zoo to offer his services as a physician to the staff members there, as well as a consultant on surgical procedures. He met Emil Dolensek, the zoo’s legendary chief veterinarian. “He was the best person I ever knew and kind of the most profound influ-ence in my life,” Grillo says. During his resi-dency, the young surgeon spent about two days a week at the zoo, and remained in touch with Dolensek after Grillo launched hissurgical practice, right up until his mentor’s death in 1990.

Then, in 1999, Grillo hit one of those turning points in his own life, after he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. Long days spent lying in the hospital and later, during rounds of chemotherapy, gave him ample time to think about his path, and in par-ticular the road not traveled, the road lined with animals, which he still had time left to explore. In 2001 Grillo shut down his practice and entered veterinary school at Tufts. “I was 53,” he notes. He was the oldest student by far in his classes and says he felt more pumped up than he had ever been.

The transition had its challenges. He was an unknown quantity on the veterinary school’s Grafton campus. M.S.A. Kumar, a pro-fessor of biomedical sciences, remembers Grillo asking “meticulous” questions in class but remaining silent about his decades of pro-fessional history as a surgeon. “He was such a modest person; he didn’t let us know what his background was,” says Kumar. “I only learned that later, during his second or third year, from [a source in] the admissions office.”

Larry Engelking, Kumar’s colleague, had Grillo as a first-year in his physiologi-cal chemistry class and recalls the middle-aged student’s initial anxiety over having forgotten so much science that he once knew cold. Grillo confided to his teacher that he feared he might flunk the first quiz. “ ‘Just calm down,’ I told him, and after that he proceeded to jump right up to the top of the class,” says Engelking. “It was always a plea-sure to see Jim standing in the doorway with some question or other.”

“Going back was the key to [my enthu-siasm],” Grillo explains. “I didn’t have the same appreciation the first time around. But after filtering through a life in [human] medicine, things were even more miraculous to me. I was learning what underpins every-thing.” Animal and human were one: This was the takeaway that anchored Grillo in his zeal. Determined to work at a zoo when he graduated, he applied for jobs around the country and was hired at Audubon in the fall of 2006.

Out among the animals, the applause is slight. One of Grillo’s favorite patients—though he’s reluctant to say “favorite” aloudfor fear of offending others in his care—is a ruffed lemur named Stella, age 29, whosemain problems include a cardiac murmurand a chronic infection in one foot; he already has performed several surgeries. “She had a tumor, and we operated,” Grillorelates, “but once they’re in their late 20s, sometimes there may not be much you can do.” In describing Stella’s prospects,you can hear the level, comforting tonethat he must have employed many timeswith patients and their families duringhis surgical days back in Manhattan. A lemur is a monkey-likecreature, but the kindness translates well.

Alone, Grillo enters an area that contains a moat and some small trees and a rounded hut, like something out of the Flintstones. There he drops down on one knee to exam-ine Stella. First, he strokes her tenderly to calm her. Then he says, “Let’s listen,” apply-ing his stethoscope to her skinny chest. He continues talking quietly to her for a while, largely unobserved and unnoticed by the world. The photographer and I are 15 or 20 yards distant, standing on an arched bridge over a culvert, unable to hear most of what he’s saying. It’s a cloudy Monday morning in New Orleans. There’s a rush from a waterfall behind us and the sound of tropical birds squawking and pealing high in the wind.

Jim Grillo is hard at work, making it look easy, one animal at a time. tvm

Bruce Morgan, the editor of Tufts Medicinemagazine, can be reached at [email protected]. Listen to Jim Grillo talk about his work by going online to: go.tufts.edu/zoovet.

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“�After�filtering�through�a�life�in�[human]�medicine,�things were even more miraculous to me. I waslearning what underpins everything.” —jim grillo, v05

Clockwise, from top left: Grillo with a female rhino that lost one of her horns; a peacock; Grillo with a favorite patient, Stella, a black and white ruffed lemur with a heart murmur and a chronic foot infection; and a golden lion tamarin, a small New World monkey native to the Brazilian coastal forests.

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By genevieve rajewski illustration by david Pohl

A phone call away, veterinary students help owners

work through the heartache of losing a beloved pet

LifeLines

danny’s death completely blindsided his owner, andrea jamison.

At age 10, the green-eyed tuxedo cat was relatively young, compared

with his 14-year-old calico housemate. What Jamison initially thought

was stress-related hiding from noisy construction in her Virginia

Beach home proved a harbinger of something more serious. After

Danny spent Christmas Day in the emergency room, Jamison learned

the cat was dying of heart failure. Three days later, she said goodbye to

her beloved companion.

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“When [the veterinarian] gave Danny the shot, I felt something in me die along with him,” Jamison says. “That first night, the pain was almost physically unbearable. I really thought I was going to lose it.”

On the surface, Jamison managed to keep it together. Inside, though, the hurt didn’t wane. “Every time I would look at Danny’s favorite napping places, I would feel a stab in my heart,” she says. “I didn’t want to eat. I had trouble sleeping. I was very depressed.”

Weeks after burying Danny, Jamison began searching online for support groups. She read about the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine’s free pet-loss hotline. She dialed, and Melissa De Fabrizio, V15, picked up the phone 500 miles away.

“Melissa was extremely caring and very professional,” recalls Jamison. “She just let me talk and cry, and she didn’t interrupt me. Getting out the grief helped a lot.”

The student-run hotline (dial 508.839.7966) has fielded more than 2,000 calls since it launched 16 years ago, from clients of the veterinary school’s hospitals to grieving ani-mal owners from around the country.

Tami Pierce, V97, started the service in 1996, after reading an article about a simi-lar program at the UC-Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. Now, 23 student vol-unteers staff the hotline weeknights from 6 to 9 and respond to voicemails left off-hours during the next shift. Their goal is not to provide counseling or medical advice, but to offer emotional support to pet owners as they work through their grief.

Mourning and unMooredMore than 72 million American households include pets, according to the American Pet Products Association. The American Veterinary Medical Association’s most recent U.S. Pet Ownership Demographics

Sourcebook reports that about half of those households view their animals as family members.

“Pets fulfill roles in [our] lives much like people do,” says Claire Sharp, a faculty advi-sor for the hotline who has comforted pet owners around end-of-life issues as an emer-gency room vet at Tufts’ Foster Hospital for Small Animals. “A pet may be a child sub-stitute, for want of a better term, if people don’t have children or if their children have left the house,” she says. “A pet may be a companion, especially if a spouse has died or a person is separated or divorced. And for some people, a pet is their most reliable friend, one that doesn’t judge or get upset.”

It’s no wonder that the end of such a rela-

tionship can cause considerable pain. The death of a pet also may deepen or re-

open other feelings of loss, such as when an animal represents the last link to a deceased family member.

Although the grieving process following a pet’s death is similar to that experienced by people who have lost a family member or friend, the issue is largely ignored by the counseling and medical professions, accord-ing to a report in the journal Perspectives of Psychiatric Care.

Unfortunately, the death of a pet often isn’t recognized by family members, friends and coworkers as a real loss, either.

“How other people react can be dev-astating for someone who has lost a pet,” says Anne Lindsay, founding president of the Massachusetts Animal Coalition, who teaches a course on euthanasia and the human-animal bond at Tufts and leads training sessions for the hotline volun-teers. “They may minimize the loss by say-ing things like, ‘Well, at least you can get another cat.’ Or, ‘Why are you so sad about a dog? It’s not like it’s a child.’ ”

W hen the human-anima l bond is trivialized, a pet owner can experience what’s known as disenfranchised grief, says Lindsay, who has a master’s degree in counseling psychology. Kenneth J. Doka, a leading expert on grief counsel-ing and therapy, introduced the concept in his 1989 book Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow.

This kind of grief, Lindsay says, hap-pens when people “incur a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, socially sanctioned or publicly mourned.” People experience disenfranchised grief for many reasons. A miscarriage, for example, is dev-astating for the baby’s parents, but is still not acknowledged publicly, she says.

Mental health professionals note that because these mourners lack a traditional path for grieving, they often are not offered social sympathy and support, never mind the ritual of a funeral or time off from work to heal. And because these kinds of loss tend to remain private, those suffering from disenfranchised grief typically experience more intense emotional reactions to their loss. They also may believe the depth of their sorrow is inappropriate, which can lead to feelings of shame.

The hotline volunteers are there to listen. “Whatever people on that phone are

going through is perfectly normal,” says Lindsay. “What callers need is someone to bear witness, to hear their stories in a com-passionate way, so that they can feel sup-ported and part of a community of others who know what it feels like to lose a pet.”

The hotline also can help callers think through the therapeutic use of ritual. Hotline volunteers will ask callers, “What are your rituals after a death? Would you like me to talk to you a little bit about some things you might do to help you get through this?”

“we have a gift that we can give our aniMaLs that we can’t give to huMans.

when they are reaLLy suffering,we can Let theM go.”

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Grieving owners can memorialize a pet by creating a photo scrapbook, writing the pet a love letter, keeping a journal of happy memories, donating to a shelter or plant-ing a tree in a spot that was special to the animal.

overwhelMing guiltAfter losing a pet, people usually experience many of the well-documented five stages of grief, including anger and depression. However, Sharp says, pet loss differs from other losses in that “guilt tends to play a big-ger factor in the grieving process”—much of it tied to decisions around euthanasia.

Although we may face the choice to end life support for a family member, the diffi-cult decision to end a life is far more com-mon in veterinary medicine. “Removing life support happens only with people in a terminal state,” notes Sharp. But with pets, “you can choose to make a decision for euthanasia well before that.” An owner may opt for euthanasia even when treatment is still possible, because the animal’s quality of life may decline significantly, or because the owner cannot afford the treatment.

“We have a gift that we can give our ani-mals that we can’t give to humans,” says Lindsay, the counselor. “When they are really suffering, we can let them go. But there can be a lot of guilt around making that decision. It’s a gift and a curse all at the same time.”

Owners’ guilt around the timing of the decision to euthanize—whether they let a pet go too soon, or waited too long—is also a common theme among the hotline callers.

“No matter what side they’re on, they’re saying the same thing,” says Kara Palac, V14, the hotline’s student coordinator.

Many pet owners express concern that perhaps their animal had been showing signs of illness, Sharp says, but they didn’t understand the severity of those symptoms and delayed seeking veterinary care. They “contemplate that maybe things would have been different if they had just [seen the vet-erinarian] earlier,” she adds.

But the reality is that most animals, espe-cially cats, don’t give us a lot of clues that they’re sick. “A pet can go from seeming not quite right to being in a terminal condition over a period of days,” Sharp says. “People

are often hypochondriacs. We have a head-ache one day and think, ‘Oh my God, I have a brain tumor.’ Whereas our pets might go on having a headache for ages when they actually have a brain tumor, and it’s not until they have a seizure that we notice any-thing’s wrong.”

In addition to helping owners work through their grief, the hotline plays a vital role in veterinary education, says Sharp, because “we get to teach a new generation of veterinarians how to communicate with pet owners.”

“As veterinarians, we tend to talk a lot, advising people on treatments and care,” explains Pierce, the Tufts hotline founder who is now on the faculty at the UC-Davis veterinary school. “Yet listening to peo-ple is a skill that must be practiced to be learned. You don’t have to fix all of a client’s

problems. In fact, with pet loss, you can’t,” she says. “But you can be there to help them sort through their emotions.”

Jamison still grieves for her cat Danny: “It still hurts very much, but it’s gotten a bit easier.” She credits the emotional support of her friends and the Tufts hotline, as well as her own efforts to work through her sorrow by writing about Danny, creating an online memorial and reading books about pet loss.

She recently adopted Mindy, a 5-month-old female tuxedo cat, in honor of Danny. “She’s quite a handful,” says Jamison. “But she’s also a very sweet cat. She loves to snuggle. I think [Danny] would have liked her.” tvm

Genevieve Rajewski, the editor of this magazine, can be reached at [email protected].

EmpathEtic ListEnErs

The death of a pet is just one reason animal owners call the Tufts hotline. The student

volunteers can help answer your questions about a range of issues, including:

n Did your pet run away, or were you unable to keep an animal because of a move,

allergies or financial constraints?

n Do you need to talk through end-of-life decisions for your pet, such as when is the

right time to say goodbye and how to handle the remains?

n Need information on helping a child grieving the loss of a pet or another pet in the

house that is out of sorts because of a loss?

n Wondering how to decide when to get a new pet?

When you call the hotline at 508.839.7966, you will speak one-to-one with a student

volunteer. There is no formula for any call. The hotline volunteer also can send you a

personalized packet of articles and book lists tailored to your specific needs.

The hotline is staffed weeknights from 6 to 9 EST, with more limited hours over the

summer. Messages left during off-hours will be returned, at no cost to you, during the

next scheduled shift.

For more on the hotline, including links to other resources, visit tufts.edu/vet/petloss.

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ESCAPE from

farMageDDon30075_6t29.indd 16 5/4/12 9:43 AM

farMageDDonOne breed of livestock vanishes from the planet every

month. Why that’s not a good thing for any of us

By genevieve rajewski PhotograPhs by alonso nichols

Opposite page: Gideon, an endangered Arapawa buck, donated his sperm to the SVF Foundation’s campaign to preserve 40 of the rarest breeds of livestock. This page: Tunis ewes graze at Swiss Village Farm in Newport,

R.I., while a guard llama stands watch atop a hill overlooking the herd.

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If the Arapawa breed disappears, so too goes our last link to the original hardy “Old English” goat that the Pilgrims ferried to Massachusetts aboard the Mayf lower for milk and meat. To make sure the Arapawa don't vanish from the planet, the Caldwells dispatched their entire herd of rare goats to a most unlikely destination: a place called Swiss Village Farm in tony Newport, R.I.

The setting appears straight out of a fairy tale, but the plot is plucked straight from sci-ence fiction. Built in the early 20th century as a “gentleman’s folly” hobby farm, the prop-erty looks just like what its name implies: an extravagant re-creation of a Swiss village. More than a dozen tile-roofed stone cottages with hand-hewn wooden beams dot ver-dant pastures surrounded by the sprawling Newport mansions and, just beyond, a stun-ning coastline. Inside these quaint buildings are high-tech surgical suites and laborato-ries, where Tufts University veterinarians will harvest sperm and embryos from the Arapawa goats and then bathe the genetic material in liquid nitrogen to cryogenically preserve it at temperatures so bitterly cold that the cells are essentially frozen in time. Should the Arapawa become extinct, this precious DNA could be thawed and used to reawaken the breed.

The procedure has been repeated many times over the past decade as Tufts and the Swiss Village Farm Foundation, alsoknown as SVF Foundation, race against the clock to conserve 40 of the rarest breedsof cattle, sheep and goats in North America.The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organiza-tion reports the planet is losing one breed of livestock every month. Now halfway into its 20-year conservation campaign, SVF has collected more than 60,000 samples of genetic material from 21 of the target breeds.

So why should you care about saving a handful of odd-looking goats or heat-loving Pineywoods cows or the multihorned sheep named for Jacob in the Old Testament? For starters, SVF’s “seed bank” of frozen material protects the world’s food supply by maintaining its diversity. Preserving an array of livestock breeds that can thrive in hot, humid climates or more arid regions of the world means people have access to food, no matter where they live. Beyond the din-ner table, though, this cache of frozen germ-plasm could one day be instrumental in developing treatments for human diseases, such as Tay-Sachs and some neuromuscular disorders.

Barnyard critters don’t typically figure into our mental picture of endangered spe-cies now that a handful of super-producing breeds have stepped up to meet nearly all our food needs. Consider the dairy industry. Although Guernsey cows produce creamier products than those made with milk from Holstein cows, they can’t touch the ubiq-uitous black-and-white breed for sheer vol-ume of milk production. A top-producing Holstein churns out 25,000 pounds of milk each year—several thousand more pounds than any other major dairy breed. Today, nine of every 10 U.S. dairies milk Holsteins.

Our reliance on monocultures—grow-ing one type of high-yield plant or raising one animal species in overwhelmingly large numbers—has benefited U.S. consumers through the widespread availability of uni-form, affordable food products. However, this bigger-is-better approach comes with significant risks, warns George Saperstein, an expert in preserving endangered live-stock and the Amelia Peabody Professor of Agricultural Sciences at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine. “Genetic

diversity in livestock is as important as it is in plants,” says Saperstein, a scientific advi-sor to SVF.

In plant agriculture, the scariest tale about a monoculture is the Irish Potato Famine. Between 1845 and 1849, more than 1 million people starved to death when Ireland’s genetically identical “lumpers” potatoes rotted in the fields, destroyed by a new fungus. The plant disease, which is difficult to control even today, ran rampant because lumpers had no natural resistance to the blight. (Fungicides wouldn’t become available for another 40 years.)

In the case of food animals, the deli-cate balance between genetic diversity and high-volume production may already be coming undone.

Artif icia l insemination, which was perfected in cattle in the late 1940s, now accounts for 85 percent of Holstein births. One Holstein bull can sire as many as 50,000 daughters—and half the genes in America’s 8.6 million Holstein cows come from fewer than 20 prize bulls, according to a New York Times report. This kind of intensive inbreed-ing promotes undesirable traits, and Holstein breeders recently have had to contend with

he 15 shaggy arapawa goats from alan and joan caldwell’s farm in

Rehoboth, Mass., are in a fight for their breed’s life. Whalers and British colo-

nists first brought these goats’ ancestors to Arapawa Island, off the coast of

New Zealand, where the hardy breed lived in isolation, largely unchanged

for more than 200 years. Then, about 30 years ago, the New Zealand Forest

Service decided the goats had outstayed their welcome—trampling and grazing

through large swaths of the native forest—and so began to cull them from the

island. Today, only a few hundred Arapawa goats remain in the world, scattered in

small herds throughout the United States, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

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a raft of new health issues in their herds, including fertility problems, compromised immunity and congenital defects.

Meanwhile, the growing “global reliance on Holsteins, which need lots of water and [expensive] grain to make milk, is risky in a world where desertification is spread-ing, and economies are not growing,” says Jennifer Kendall of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy.

“Developing countries want our Holsteinsbecause we’ve taken that cow to the next level of increased efficiency,” agrees Saperstein. “However, many countries that import Holsteins to tropical climates watch them die, because they’ll never do as well in heat and humidity as their indigenous breeds.”

noah’s ParkAlthough SVF chose to focus on grass-grazing farm animals native to North America, it was a cattle scourge in England that launched the foundation’s campaign to rescue these heritage breeds. Dorrance Hill Hamilton, a Philadelphia philanthro-pist who spent her girlhood summers in Newport, was flying home from Europe in 1998, when she read a newspaper article

about the mass slaughter of cattle following the outbreak of mad cow disease. In Great Britain alone, 180,000 cattle were infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a fatal neurodegenerative disease that humans could get by eating meat from infected cows. Ultimately, Britain slaughtered 3.7 million cows, a third of its bovine population, to contain the outbreak.

Hamilton had recently purchased Swiss Village—once the opulent country home of railroad baron Arthur Curtiss James and his prize herd of Guernsey cattle—to preserve the rolling, green farmland that she remem-bered from her childhood. “I read that when rare livestock was slaughtered, it might be hard to bring them back,” recalls Hamilton. “I thought maybe I could help by raising some of those breeds.”

Back in Rhode Island, Hamilton shared her idea with a city councilwoman whose dog had been a patient at the Foster Hospital at the Cummings School. She encour-aged Hamilton to approach Tufts, where she met Saperstein, professor and chair of environmental and population health, and talked about her vision for her 45-acre farm. Saperstein told Hamilton that she had only

enough land for a small herd of one breed. Then he asked the money question: “But have you thought about cryopreservation?”

Hamilton was sold. In 2002, she estab-lished the nonprof it SVF Foundation and signed a contract with Tufts to begin the work. The goal of the Tufts/SVF col-laboration is to collect and cryopreserve at least 200 embryos and 3,000 samples of semen for each of the rare North American livestock breeds on SVF’s conservation priority list—a modern-day Noah’s ark, if you will.

Typically, the heritage breeds are loaned or donated to SVF. At first, breeders needed quite a bit of convincing to participate, says Peter Borden, SVF’s executive director. “On the one hand, they knew they had the last remaining bloodlines of their breed, so they’d recognize our plan as, ‘What a great opportunity to preserve what I have here for all time.’ But quite a few breeders also had anxiety about what we were going to do with those genetics—kind of like a poodle breeder worrying, ‘Are you going to be mak-ing Labradoodles with my genes?’ ”

To date, nearly 700 head of livestock have passed through the program. SVF staff pick

Left: Nick Bowley, SVF’s lead herdsperson, guides an Arapawa goat (grab him by the horns is the only way to go) from the SVF trailer to a physical exam upon arriving at Swiss Village Farm. Leading two more goats behind him are SVF program manager Sarah Bowley and Tufts veterinarian David Matsas. Above: Pablo, an Arapawa buck.

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up and return all the animals in a 28-foot antiseptic trailer to make sure no diseases infect their precious cargo en route to Swiss Village. They have driven more than 80,000 miles, to every corner of the country, in pur-suit of the weird and wonderful—from one animal to an entire herd. Although the trips may sound blissful—winding through the Rocky Mountains or passing former Pony Express stations on the Great Plains—mostly it’s grinding work. The herd staff drive 14 hours at a time. They stay only at motels where their rooms overlook the trailer, and they can hitch hoses to a kitchen faucet so the animals always have water.

Life on the road can, on occasion, get hairy. Once, on a night run down to Virginia to pick up Ancient White Park cows, the SVF truck nearly jackknifed as it swerved around a car inexplica-bly parked, with its lights off, across the middle lanes of the highway. “We were so happy to make it to the hotel alive,” saysSVF program manager Sarah Bowley, who recruits breeders into the conservation fold.

On another trip, just after SVF staff had gotten back on the road after dropping off six Dutch belted cattle in West Virginia, the trailer got stuck in traffic as tempera-tures soared above 100 degrees. If they had been transporting animals, “we would have had to call 911 to get the fire department to hose them down inside the trailer or pull into the breakdown lane, let the livestock loose and try to move them somewhere shady,” Bowley says.

SVF staffers have gone to Louisiana to collect two Pineywoods heifers, a breed descended from cattle the first Spanish set-tlers brought to the Southeast in the 1500s. In California, SVF rounded up some of the last remaining Santa Cruz sheep, a meat and wool breed that had grazed on Santa Cruz Island since the mid-1800s. Twelve Canadienne catt le, an ancient French Canadian breed that can dine on all manner of scrawny shrubs and weedsand still produce tasty milk ideal for making cheese, came from a farm in New York.

“Before any animal is brought into the program, it is tested for a battery of viral and bacterial diseases,” says David Matsas, an assistant professor of environmental and population health at the Cummings School. “All new arrivals are placed in a quarantine pasture for a minimum of 30 days and given a thorough physical exam. We look for any signs of infectious or contagious diseases, such as pink eye, sore mouth, foot rot, par-asites and respiratory or gastrointestinal disease.” Sheep and goats are also checked for swollen lymph nodes or abscesses that might signal caseous lymphadenitis, a highly contagious bacterial disease known as “the curse” of these livestock.

“If we are going to preserve germplasm for all time, we don’t want to preserve any viruses along with it,” notes Saperstein.

The animals spend anywhere from nine months to two years roaming SVF’s pastures, under the watchful gaze of the farm’s three guard llamas, as they go through a breeding

cycle and germplasm collection. Sheep and goats are bred naturally, during the typical breeding season from September to March. Matsas collects the embryos in SVF’s high-tech surgical suite, where fourth-year Tufts veterinary students assist in the laparoscopic procedure. Cattle are bred year-round by arti-ficial insemination. Tufts population health veterinarians Kevin Lindell and Gene White and their students collect the bovine embryos.

After embryos are flushed from an ani-mal’s womb, they are handed over in a Petri dish to the SVF lab director, Dorothy Roof, who has the all-important assignment of pronouncing them fit enough to freeze. She evaluates the quality of the embryos, nearly invisible to the naked eye, with a micro-scope that f lashes images onto a large f lat-screen monitor. “It’s sort of like playing ‘Where’s Waldo?’ ” says Roof as she swirls the contents of one Petri dish and squints into the microscope before relaying her verdict via speakerphone to the Tufts veterinarians and SVF staff.

Embryos that make the cut are siphoned into plastic straws and put into a metal box full of liquid nitrogen, where they slowly chillto minus 35 degrees Celsius—just five degreesshy of the temperature at which human skin

Top left: Lenape, a black-and-white belted Galloway cow, and her bull calf, Marley, at the trough with Gabrielle, a Pineywoods heifer, and her bull calf, Yukon. Top right: Clementine, a native Milking Shorthorn heifer, a milk and meat cow that is among the oldest cattle breeds in the world.

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freezes instantly. The embryos are then stored in one of four 100-gallon tanks of liquid nitrogen, where they’ll remain, at a very arctic minus 196 degrees Celsius, until needed—and the hope is that will be never.

Although the technology at SVF is on par with that in human fertility clinics, Saperstein says you can’t beat fresh genetic material for reproductive success. “The process of freezing has to do some minor damage to cells,” says Saperstein, who notes that the conception rate for transferring a fresh embryo into a surrogate is slightly bet-ter than for a frozen one. “And everybody wants to know how can you tell if the col-lection is alive and usable.” Fortunately, the Tufts veterinarians can easily assess the viability of semen by thawing a few of each breed’s thousands of samples and exam-ining them under a microscope with the aid of computerized analysis. “You com-pare the data with what we saw when the semen was fresh,” says Saperstein. “That way, if you see the sperm was at 70 per-cent motility when it was fresh, and now it’s at 68 percent when it’s thawed out, you know you’re doing a good job. And youcan check that every year if you want to.”

Embryos present a greater challenge. “We are collecting only 200 embryos per breed, and they are much more valuable,” notes Saperstein. To assess an embryo’s viability, there is just one option: thaw one out and transplant it into a surrogate mother from another breed and hope she gives birth to the rare breed. Embryo transplant is successful about half the time, as is the case in the best breeding operations. At Swiss Village, com-mon livestock have birthed nine endangered animals: Arapawa kids; American milk-ing Devon, Dutch belted and Canadienne calves; and Cotswold, Gulf Coast, Santa Cruz and Tunis lambs. The first successful embryonic transfer was SVF’s mascot, Chip, a Tennessee fainting goat (yes, they do fall down, but only when startled) born to a common Nubian doe in 2005.

back to the FutureAt the end of the day, though, “it doesn’t do much good to have a population in iso-lation in a liquid-nitrogen tank,” observes Saperstein. “Over time, people would forget what the animals looked like or why we even

had them. So we really need breeders to pro-mote the conservation of the live animals.” To that end, SVF also acts as matchmaker, putting owners of heritage livestock in touch with each other so their rare animals can be bred on the hoof, as they say.

And while you’d never dream of serv-ing endangered tigers for supper as a way to keep them around for another few cen-turies, the same can’t be said for rare cattle, goats or sheep. “That more than anything will benefit biodiversity,” says Saperstein. “We have to put these animals back to work if we are to really save them.” That’s why SVF encourages small farmers nationwide to take advantage of consumer demand for artisan, local and sustainably grown foods by developing heritage-breed products. Many heritage livestock are far better suited to eating grass and living outdoors on small farms than the high-maintenance breeds raised on large commercial farms.

Though SVF is determined to save the rarest North American ruminants, regard-less of whether there is an overt imperative for any particular breed, Saperstein notes that many breeds have special traits because they evolved in geographic isolation—and that has applications for human and veteri-nary medicine.

Consider, for example, the endangered Gulf Coast sheep, another breed the Spanish brought to the New World. “Sheep farm-ing’s biggest problem [around the globe] is a widespread resistance to dewormers. It’s very similar to antibiotic resistance in people,” says Saperstein. “But the Gulf Coast breed evolved tolerating parasites. If we can figure out how that genetic resistance works, we may be able to impart that immunity to commercial breeds through cross-breeding, gene therapy or the development of a drug.”

He notes that other breeds “have unique genetic characteristics that may not seem particularly desirable, but those faulty genes might make the animal a good model for developing new treatments for human diseases.” The genetic mutation that causes the fatal neurodegenerative disorder Tay-Sachs in children, for example, also exists in Jacob sheep. Research done at New York University School of Medicine not only has helped keep this defect from accelerating the disappearance of the rare sheep breed, but led to the first animal model for studying gene therapies for Tay-Sachs, which typi-cally kills children before their fifth birth-day. And Saperstein notes that Tennessee fainting goats—which fall over when star-tled because of a genetic disorder that trig-gers all their skeletal muscles to contract at once—could someday help people with con-genital myotonia, a neuromuscular disorder that affects muscles used in such activities as walking, holding onto something, chew-ing and swallowing.

Saperstein says that while these are great, tangible reasons for preserving endangered livestock, it’s just as important to save them for reasons we’ve yet to imagine. If not, he says, it would be like a society in which all the libraries have been obliterated.

“What if we only kept what was written every year and threw the rest of our books away? Well, that’s what happens when we discard breeds cultivated over centuries to focus only on the animals currently deemed utilitarian,” he says. “Once these animals are gone, they’re gone. And then we’ll never be able to visit that genetic library to select a breed that’s right for that world we’re liv-ing in, whether it’s for resistance to a certain disease or better suited to meeting a con-sumer demand for grass-fed beef.” tvm

Want to LEarn morE?

The Swiss Village Farm is typically closed to the public. But on Saturday, June 2, you can see the heritage livestock, tour the historic property, talk with veterinary, laboratory and animal-care staff and view cryogenic and sheep-shearing demonstrations at the SVF Foundation’s annual Visitors Day from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The event is free, and transportation to the farm will be provided from Fort Adams State Park in Newport, R.I. For more information, contact the SVF Foundation at 401.848.7229 or email [email protected].

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A disease you’ve probably never heard of destroyed cattle, starved millions and brought down empires before Tufts veterinarians vanquished it from the face of the earth

By MichaeL BLanDing

iLLustrations BY michaEL paraskEvas

in ethiopia, 1889 was known as the year of cattle annihilation. on the heels of an italian invasion, cattlethroughout the country were gripped by a strange new disease. Cows became feverish and lost their appetites, retreat-ing to shady spots to sit and shiver. Eventually, they collapsed from dehydration, dead just days after their first symp-toms. The disease was fatal nearly 100 percent of the time and incredibly contagious, wiping out nine out of 10 cows as it spread south. It wasn’t just cattle that suffered. Deprived of their food source, millions of people died of starvation.

That epidemic, while horrible, was just the latest scourge brought about by cattle plague, or rinderpest, as the disease had been named by German biologists. It had ravaged the world since biblical times—identified as one of the 12 plagues of Egypt in 3000 BC and a factor in the fall of the Roman Empire. And now it is gone.

In May 2011, officials with the U.N. World Organization for Animal Health stood on a stage in Paris and announced the once unimaginable. “Rinderpest is the first animal disease ever to be eradicated by man,” said the organization’s director, Bernard Vallat. In fact, it is only the second disease ever to be eliminated from the world, after smallpox, and in many ways just as significant a feat. As William R. White, an expert on rinderpest at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, put it: “This is probably the greatest achievement in veterinary medicine.”

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wiped out

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If that is true, then it is also not an understatement to say that without the contributions of several researchers from the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and Feinstein International Center at Tufts, the eradication of rinderpest never would have happened. To defeat the disease, researchers had to accomplish two daunting tasks: develop a vaccine that could withstand Africa’s blistering temperatures, and then find a way to get it to the remote grasslands where pastoralists kept their herds. Tufts veterinarians held the keys to both breakthroughs.

the cold-chain ProbleM

The fight against rinderpest properly begins in 18th-century Europe, when the world’s first veterinary college was founded in Lyons specifically to combat rinderpest. Tactics mostly consisted of identifying infected animals

and forcing massive slaughtering campaigns. Biologists worked for the next 200 years to find a vaccine that would provide immunity to the disease, but it wasn’t until after World War II that a young veterinarian named Walter Plowright accomplished the task while working in Kenya. Experimenting with new culturing techniques, he produced a vaccine that was nearly 100 percent effective and could be used on cows of any age or breed, anywhere in the world.

There was only one problem with Plowright’s vaccine: It had to be kept cold. That wasn’t difficult in Europe or most of Asia, but for those working in Africa, maintaining refrigeration was a deal breaker. “They used to take these four-wheel-drive vehicles with chests filled with ice,” says Al Sollod, a veterinarian who was work-ing in Niger before he joined Tufts’ veterinary school in 1981. “It really limited how far they could go.” Sollod had worked to com-bat rinderpest in Niger under a contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which he brought with him to Tufts. But Sollod balked at continuing to supply the country with the vaccine, telling the USAID that the money would be better spent driving down costs by reducing dependency on the “cold chain.”

That meant developing something that never had been seriously considered: a vaccine that could withstand African temperatures. Sollod turned to Jeffrey Mariner, V87, then a veterinary student who had begged him for a chance to get out into the field. Instead, Sollod sent Mariner to the USDA research center on Plum Island, N.Y., the only facility in the country authorized to work on rinderpest.

Mariner worked in the lab under Jim House, a longtime specialist in vaccine production, who thought he had an idea that might work. Ever since Plowright’s time, the rinderpest vaccine had been freeze-dried to allow it to survive longer—a process almost exactly like freeze-drying coffee to lock in flavor. House thought that if they could find the right additives during the drying process, they might strengthen the struc-ture enough to withstand higher temperatures as well.

The actual experimentation fell to Mariner, who spent hours mix-ing different chemicals into the vaccine. He finally hit pay dirt with a combination of lactalbumin—a protein found in milk—and sucrose, or table sugar. When drying at a low temperature for a longer time, a sugar scaffold formed over the culture, giving the vaccine the stability to last three months or longer, even at 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Mariner finally got his chance to do field work in 1990, when

he traveled to Niger to test the vaccine. Using doses that had sat unrefrigerated for months, he inoculated 144 calves. Afterward, 141 tested positive for immunity to rinderpest. In just a year and a half, the team had succeeded in producing something simple yet game-changing: a heat-stable rinderpest vaccine. Niger and other coun-tries in West Africa began using the vaccine right away, eradicating the disease within just a few years. In East Africa, however, Mariner and the other veterinary workers would find that rinderpest was not so easily mastered. Even the best vaccine in the world was worthless, after all, if you couldn’t get it to the animals that needed it.

local knowledge, big PayoFF

Eastern Africa’s grasslands are vast and roadless, thinly populated by itinerant herders who migrate hundreds of miles in search of the best grazing land. Down the center of the region, the Great Rift Valley cuts like a scar for 4,000

miles, fringed by rocky hills and volcanic mountains. Making the landscape even more difficult for veterinarians to navigate was the political instability that has plagued the Horn of Africa for decades. Tribes with fierce histories of cattle raiding and warfare roamed the plains of Ethiopia and Kenya, while civil wars in Sudan and Somalia beset the area with warring militia groups.

This is the landscape that Berhanu Admassu faced in 1992. Then Ethiopian branch coordinator of the Pan-African Rinderpest Campaign—he’s now a senior researcher with Tufts’ Feinstein International Center—Admassu had worked for five years organiz-ing vaccination drives. Despite his best efforts, the disease hung on in the Afar, a vast region of low-lying plains that forms the northern end of the Great Rift Valley. Admassu and his teams would drive as far into the valley as roads would take them, but most of the herd-ers never brought their animals to vaccination stations. “The people were bringing in some heifers just to satisfy us,” says Admassu, “but quite a number of animals were not being vaccinated.”

It was about that time that Admassu heard about Jeff Mariner, who was then testing the heat-stable vaccine in East Africa. Mariner and his team already had been experimenting with a new secret weapon: getting tribespeople to vaccinate their own herds. The idea had been percolating for some time, proposed in Niger by Sollod and used successfully by the British veterinarian Tim Leyland in Afghanistan. By the early 1990s, Leyland had been hired by Tufts’ veterinary school, working with UNICEF to implement similar tech-niques in Southern Sudan along with Andy Catley, another Brit who was hired by Tufts a few years later. But probably the person most responsible for the success of the grassroots vaccination campaign was Darlington Akabwai, a Ugandan field vet who had been working on rinderpest for 20 years, and whom Mariner and Leyland hired to lead the local vaccination training efforts.

Akabwai had developed a program to train tribesmen to appoint their own members to perform vaccinations against a host of dis-eases. “The pastoralists have this traditional knowledge system,” he says. “Their livelihood is based on livestock. They grow up sleeping next to these cows, and they know the diseases better than any veter-inary textbook.” But though they recognized the diseases, they knew little about how they were spread or how to stop them. Akabwai used

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pictures and stories to show how vaccines worked. To explain why cattle had to be vaccinated three times, for example, he would draw an outline of a cow, and after each vaccination, draw a picture of a soldier with an AK-47 standing inside the cow to protect it. “They understood—they are warriors,” says Akabwai. “They all wanted their warriors to add up to three.”

Once he had convinced the tribal elders, he would ask them to identify the most responsible young men, who would often travel miles on foot through the roadless grasslands to administer the vaccines. The clincher occurred when the head of the Pan-African Rinderpest Campaign, Walter Massega, came to observe the new animal health workers in the field. Instead of veterinarians franti-cally herding animals into a cattle crush to stick them with syringes, he watched the locals walk calmly up to vaccinate their own cattle as they stood in the pasture. Massega was a convert. “He came back saying it was a religious experience,” says Mariner. “Years of data didn’t matter—what mattered was seeing it.”

The data itself, however, was hard to dismiss. In the early 1990s, 42 newly trained animal health workers were sent into the Afar under the supervision of Berhanu Admassu’s government program. Sure enough, the vaccine reached far more cattle than had been pos-sible before. Eighty-four percent of cattle in the area tested immune from rinderpest, up from 72 percent with the traditional approach. After a second round of vaccinations in 1994, nobody in the country could find a single case of rinderpest.

The success in the Afar was the turning point in the fight against rinderpest. Its lessons were repeated in other pockets that served as reservoirs for the disease, among them Sudan, Somalia and parts of Kenya. By 2000, the Tufts vets were retraining community workers to monitor cattle for outbreaks rather than treating them. The dis-ease departed each of the afflicted regions without fanfare, observes

Mariner. “We would fight, fight, fight,” he says. “And all of a sudden we’d say, ‘Look, it’s gone,’ and it didn’t make any noise when it left.”

The world’s last confirmed case of rinderpest occurred in Kenya in 2001, though the disease is thought to have lingered a few more years in Somalia. The U.N. remained cautious, waiting for a decade as individual countries performed the necessary surveys to qualify herds as rinderpest-free. Finally, on May 25, 2011, at a conference in Paris, the world body declared rinderpest gone. Tim Leyland, Jeffrey Mariner and Berhanu Admassu were there to receive medals for their part in the effort.

In the end, says Mariner, it was the community health workers who made the difference. “It took two years to make the vaccine, but 10 or 15 years to get it used. Working with people is much more com-plicated than working in the lab.” Mariner now works in Kenya, in part attacking another disease called contagious bovine pleuropneu-monia, while Admassu and Akabwai are working as field researchers for Tufts’ Feinstein Center in Ethiopia and Kenya, respectively.

The techniques they helped pioneer have continued to be used around the world for other diseases, including a close cousin of rin-derpest called peste des petits ruminants (PPR), which strikes goats and sheep. Efforts are under way to produce a heat-stable version of the PPR vaccine. Recently, the Veterinary Record, the influential journal of the British Veterinary Association, called for an international effort to vaccinate against PPR, saying “we believe that another great success could be achieved within a 10-year time frame.”

Rinderpest may be only the second disease in history to van-ish from the earth, but if the lessons behind its eradication can be learned, it won’t be the last. tvm

Michael Blanding has written for The New Republic, The Nation, Consumers Digest, The Boston Globe and Boston Magazine.

OUT�OF�AFRICA By aLBert e . soLLoD

I was fortunate to spend many years on the Tufts veterinary faculty guiding our contribu-tion toward the goal of eradicating rinderpest.

Some of my fondest recollections come from my experiences in sub-Saharan Africa. I remember playing Emmylou Harris’s Evangeline album while camping one night on blazing hot sand under the stars. It occurred to me and a colleague, the anthropologist James Knight, that animal health interven-tions could become practical only through an understanding of the cultural, social, econom-ic and ecological contexts of pastoral herding. We somewhat pretentiously named our cross-disciplinary study “veterinary anthropology.” The methodology eventually morphed into the

notion of “participatory epidemiology,” which informed the immunization protocols in the latter stages of the rinderpest campaign.

I also remember spending an evening at a base camp in Lokichokio, in northern Kenya, after making one of my brief forays into Sudan. I had flown back into Kenya after a day on the Sobat River visiting children’s immu-nization clinics set up by relief agencies. The camp at Loki, as the town was known to aid workers, consisted entirely of tents.

As night came on, the female Kenyan and Ugandan relief workers at Loki organized a dance. I listened to Nigerian hip-hop, with short, percussive bursts from a police whistle echoing across the plains. A Sudanese boy

about 10 years old began cleaning our coffee pot and cups. I was told he hung around the camp and performed chores in exchange for meals. I was stunned when he presented me with his only adornment, a bracelet made from a single strand of copper wire stripped from a power line. He said nothing as he hand-ed it to me with a smile. I told myself I would wear it until rinderpest was eradicated. I had to remove the bracelet after a mountaineering accident in 1992, but I put it back on several months ago in honor of the official eradication of the disease.

The author is a retired professor of interna-

tional veterinary medicine at Tufts.


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It’s long been known that developmental disorders run in families, but pinpointing genetic culprits is no small task. Monaco and his laboratory have taken several quite different approaches. To track down the genes associated with autism, for example, they homed in on chromosome abnormali-ties that occur when cells divide, causing breaks in genes or changes in their number, for example by deleting a copy. Scrutinizing those chromosome abnormalities turned up single genes, or sometimes a group of genes, that influence susceptibility to autism in 15 to 20 percent of cases.

In another case, involving a family with a rare speech and language disorder, Monaco and his colleagues narrowed the cause to a single gene, FOXP2. An abnormality in that gene could signal whether a member of the family would inherit the language prob-lem, even before any symptoms appeared. By studying the FOXP2 gene in songbirds, mice and monkeys, the researchers gained insights into the gene’s role in vocaliza-tions throughout evolution and how lan-guage developed in humans. “It’s allowed us at least one entry point to start to dissect

the biological pathways inside the brain involved in speech and language,” Monaco said.

Dyslexia is another neurodevelopmen-tal disorder with a genetic component. Monaco’s team managed to identify one of four genes apparently associated with the disorder. Studies show that the gene affects how neurons form in the fetal brain. It

“might be involved in the correct adherence and migration of neurons,” Monaco said.

With all of these disorders, early detec-tion can be key to improving outcomes. The contributions Monaco and other genetics researchers are making to the field eventu-ally could lead to screening techniques that would improve diagnosis and give doctors better insight into potential treatments.

WhEn GEnEs Go aWrY

ANThONY P. MONACO, PRESIdENT,

TUfTS UNIvERSITy; PRofESSoR of BIoLogy,

ScHooL of ARTS ANd ScIENcES; PRofESSoR of

NEURoScIENcE, ScHooL of MEdIcINE (“gENETIcS

of NEURodEvELoPMENTAL dISoRdERS”)

ILLUSTRATIoNS By STUART BRAdfoRd

P R E S I D E N t ’ S S y m P o S I u m

New Thinking About ChildrenBY MIChAEL BLANDING Presidential Inauguration week, in October 2011, was marked by brilliant displays of Tufts

talent, oratory and regalia. But given the new president’s stature as a scientist, it seemed fitting that there should also be a

quieter, more scholarly event: a meeting of minds on the subject of child development. Anthony Monaco, Tufts’ thirteenth

president, wanted to prove the value of having different disciplines train their sights on the same topic—an approach that is

likely to become more and more common in these parts. Accordingly, Peggy Newell, provost and senior vice president ad

interim, organized the first inaugural symposium, Advances in Child Development. The speakers included Monaco, himself a

specialist in the genetics of developmental disorders, and one of his U.K. mentors, Sir Michael Rutter. They were joined by half

a dozen top scientists from different schools of Tufts. Topics ran the gamut from dyslexia to tooth decay. Herewith, a digest of

the talks, the full titles of which are given after each speaker’s name.

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It’s an old debate: heredity versus environment. Which of the two exerts the greater influence on the individual has proved to be even more complicated than once believed, according to Rutter. While psy-chiatrists have fixated on either biological or environmental causes of mental disorders, most such conditions now appear to stem from a complex interplay between the two.

Many of the newer findings have come from “natural experiments,” studies that compare naturally occurring groups so as to isolate genetic effects—the children of twins, for example, or children born of artificial insemination versus children of donated eggs. Previously, some clinical studies suggested that ADhD or antisocial behavior may be caused by a mother’s smoking during pregnancy—an environmental factor, in other words. But these newer studies have shown that children with certain genetic profiles suffer no such ill effects from their mothers’ smoking, although there is an effect on

birthweight. In those cases, genes trump environment.Sometimes, the opposite seems to be true. Childhood depres-

sion was long thought to be genetically determined, but new studies show that environmental factors are twice as important as genetic predisposition in determining whether a child is diagnosed with the disease. In some cases, genes and environment can have a multiplier effect, exponentially increasing the chances of developing certain disorders. In still other cases, environmental forces can be canceled out by genetics. A variant of one particular gene, for instance, affects the vulnerability of children experiencing maltreatment, helping them develop resiliency.

All these findings have dramatic implications for treatment—allowing better targeting of certain disorders. But first, Rutter said, doctors must abandon their old notions of nature or nurture in favor of a more individualized approach that sees the two as inseparable.

To most of us, reading seems such a basic brain function that we hardly stop to think about how we learned to do it. In fact, said Wolf, human beings aren’t born with any inherent ability to read text. Rather, we all jury-rig unrelated parts of our brain—those in charge of visual recogni-tion of shapes, phonological recognition of sounds and higher cognitive functions for comprehension and syntax—into a complex circuitry that decodes the sen-tence you are reading now in a matter of milliseconds. “Each new reader,” Wolf said, “must create an entire reading cir-cuit”—usually between ages 5 and 7. “It took us 2,000 years as a species to get to an

alphabet,” she said, referring to the evolu-tion from symbolic writing, such as hiero-glyphics or cuneiform, to the first real phonetic writing system, developed by the Greeks around 800 B.C. But a child must go through a similar cognitive evolution in just 2,000 days.

It’s no wonder that this complicated process sometimes goes haywire, caus-ing reading disorders. Brain scans have shown that many dyslexic children fail to activate areas in the left hemisphere for phonological skills that help in sounding out letters; instead, they use areas in the right hemisphere keyed to visualization. Wolf and her colleagues have devised ways to rewire those faulty pathways. Putting children through a special curriculum that breaks down each stage of the reading process into specific techniques, mimick-ing the sequence of activities in the brain, the researchers have seen marked improve-ment in both word recognition and read-ing comprehension.

Wolf 's latest studies look at how the daily bombardment of technology is

affecting children’s reading development. “Is that going to be changing the degree to which they possess the deep reading skills?” she asked. In other words, how will all of the circuitry we’ve created for computers affect the circuitry we’ve cre-ated in our brains?

naturE and nurturE

SIR MIChAEL RuTTER, PRofESSoR of dEvELoPMENTAL PSycHoPATHoLogy,

LoNdoN INSTITUTE of PSycHIATRy (“KEy PARAdIgM SHIfTS IN dEvELoPMENTAL ScIENcES”)

rEWirinG dYsLExia

MARYANNE WOLF, THE JoHN dIBIAggIo

PRofESSoR of cITIzENSHIP ANd PUBLIc SERvIcE,

dIREcToR of THE cENTER foR REAdINg ANd

LANgUAgE RESEARcH ANd A PRofESSoR IN THE ELIoT-

PEARSoN dEPARTMENT of cHILd dEvELoPMENT,

TUfTS UNIvERSITy (“THE EvoLvINg REAdINg BRAIN IN

A dIgITAL cULTURE”)

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trEat thE FEtus

DIANA BIANChI, ExEcUTIvE dIREcToR, MoTHER INfANT RESEARcH INSTITUTE, TUfTS MEdIcAL cEN-

TER; NATALIE v. zUcKER PRofESSoR of PEdIATRIcS, oBSTETRIcS ANd gyNEcoLogy, ScHooL of MEdIcINE;

vIcE cHAIR foR RESEARcH ANd AcAdEMIc AffAIRS, dEPARTMENT of PEdIATRIcS, fLoATINg HoSPITAL foR

cHILdREN (“TREATMENT of dEvELoPMENTAL dISoRdERS USINg A PRENATAL gENE ExPRESSIoN APPRoAcH”)

The joy of a new pregnancy is often overshadowed by The Test—routine prenatal screening for Down syndrome. If the result is positive, the parents must choose whether to continue or terminate the pregnancy. Bianchi is working on a third option: treating the condition in the womb. her lab has been looking for drugs that, given to the pregnant woman, might counter-act some of the biochemical abnormalities seen in Down fetuses. Examining RNA that floats in the amniotic fluid, Bianchi and her team found that genes in such fetuses are affected by something called oxidative stress—a byproduct of oxygen metabolism that creates destructive chemi-cals. The researchers plugged the gene expression profiles of the affected fetuses into a database of all FDA-approved drugs, searching for any that might stop the oxidative effects.

Sure enough, several drugs popped up. In early results, one of the drugs greatly reduced oxidative stress in cells from Down fetuses in the test tube. Now Bianchi’s team is experimenting with mice. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time anyone has tried to use a gene expression rationale for treating a genetic condition in utero,” Bianchi said. If it works, the same techniques could be used to treat other birth defects, perhaps opening up a whole new field: prenatal pediatrics.

The most common disease of childhood isn’t asthma or diabetes. It’s early child-hood caries, more commonly known as

tooth decay. By age 5, some 25 percent of aff luent children show some signs of the disease—caused by bacteria that turn sugar into acid, which breaks down the enamel on the teeth. Among poor children, however, the disease is epi-demic, affecting 60 percent of them by age 5. Some children exhibit signs of decay before their first birthday. “This disease shows no age limitations,” said Thomas.

While many studies have examined the role of sugar or improper bottle feeding in causing cavities, Thomas has focused on a less intuitive cause, defi-ciency of vitamin D, a problem that par-ticularly affects poor communities due to inadequate nutrition. Experimenting with mice that can’t metabolize vitamin D, Thomas has shown dramatic differ-ences in their tooth enamel compared

GroWinG up, not out

ChRISTINA D. ECONOMOS, N96,

dIREcToR, cHILdoBESITy180; NEW BALANcE cHAIR

IN cHILdHood NUTRITIoN, fRIEdMAN ScHooL of

NUTRITIoN ScIENcE ANd PoLIcy; ASSISTANT

PRofESSoR of fAMILy MEdIcINE ANd coMMUNITy

HEALTH, ScHooL of MEdIcINE (“TAcKLINg A cRISIS:

A SySTEMS APPRoAcH To oBESITy PREvENTIoN”)

Everybody talks about childhood obesity. Economos has dedicated herself to actually doing something about it. A decade ago, she helped put together a community research study in Tufts’ home base of Somerville, Mass. Shape Up Somervi l le since has become a national model. Aimed at getting children to eat healthier foods and increase physical activity, the program used a “sys-tems” approach, tackling all sides of the obesity issue at once. Parents plotted walk-ing routes to schools, the schools switched to healthier menus and doctors were trained in more effective screening for obesity. Even local restaurants got in on the act, offering smaller portions.

After the first year, the study showed a drop in obesity that translated into about a pound per child per year compared with two neighboring towns—a signifi-cant amount over childhood. “It’s exactly what we hoped for,” said Economos. When Michel le Obama launched a national campaign to combat chi ldhood obe-sity, she singled out Shape Up Somerville for praise. Economos is now develop-ing a national “playbook” for tackling the problem, recognizing that just as there is no one cause for the obesity epidemic, so there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

vitamins For tEEth

huW F. ThOMAS, dEAN ANd PRofESSoR

of PEdIATRIc dENTISTRy, TUfTS UNIvERSITy

ScHooL of dENTAL MEdIcINE (“EARLy cHILd-

Hood cARIES: THE RoLE of NUTRITIoN”)

30075_6t29.indd 28 5/4/12 9:43 AM

“You may be wondering why you have a vet-erinarian talking to you at a symposium on child development,” said Freeman. “It all boils down to the idea of One Health.” It’s the proposition that studying animals can yield insights into the treatment of human disorders, including developmental ones. The concept has been championed by Tufts and by Freeman in her research on animal nutrition.

One disease that affects both animals and humans is hypertrophic cardiomy-opathy (HCM)—a heart condition that can cause sudden cardiac death in young ath-letes. Maine coon cats have a genetic muta-tion that renders them more susceptible to the disease, and Freeman has studied them intensively. An intriguing finding: some cats with the mutation get very sick and others not at all. Why? Possibly because of differ-ences in nutrition, Freeman said.

In all sorts of animals, malnourishment during early development can interfere with important processes such as DNA repair and cell growth cycles. “Low birthweight in children can increase the risk for coronary heart disease and hypertension in later life,” Freeman said. The research on HCM could open up new treatment methods both for cats and for humans.

Sometimes pets play a therapeutic role for humans. People who want to shed pounds, for example, are more successful if they are also trying to help their tubby dog or cat lose weight. Pets can even help chil-dren learn to read. “Dogs are nonevaluative,

nonjudgmental listeners,” Freeman said. “So children who lack confidence or lack reading skills are very comfortable read-ing to dogs.” Freeman and her colleagues found that second-graders who read to dogs became better and more dedicated readers than those who read to other people. There is no word yet on how this affected the lit-eracy of the dogs.

BuiLdinG schoLars

ChRIS ROGERS, PRofESSoR of MEcHANIcAL ENgINEERINg ANd dIREcToR, cENTER foR ENgINEERINg

EdUcATIoN ANd oUTREAcH, ScHooL of ENgINEERINg, TUfTS UNIvERSITy (“KINdERgARTEN ENgINEERINg:

MoTIvATINg cREATIvITy ANd INNovATIoN IN THE cLASSRooM”)

A local first-grade teacher gave her pupils Lego blocks, gears and a mechanical motor, and asked them to make a snowplow to push Styrofoam packing peanuts out of the way. Most of the kids aced the assignment. But then she made the peanuts heavier by soaking them in water. Now only a few kids, those who had used geared wheels for more power, succeed-ed. “All of a sudden,” Rogers recounted, “they were really interested in what gears were.”

That hands-on lesson is typical of the way Rogers and his outreach team teach mechani-cal and mathematical principles to young children. They set a goal, encourage as many routes to that goal as possible and then let the kids keep trying until they succeed.

When kids learn with their hands, they retain more. Children who learned fractions from a blackboard did just as well on a math test as those who learned fractions by programming a Lego robot car to travel different distances. But tested again six weeks later, the Lego kids remembered almost twice as much as the blackboard kids.

Such methods aren’t easy to integrate into a classroom geared to standardized tests, so Rogers and the center have developed teaching tools, training programs and online communities to help teachers adopt the techniques. ultimately, he’d be happy if standard-ized tests favored creative problem-solving. “If we can try and get as much variation in the solutions as possible, instead of one right answer,” he said, “then I think we’ve succeeded.”

LEarninGFrom animaLs

LISA FREEMAN, J86, V91, N96,

PRofESSoR of cLINIcAL ScIENcES, cUMMINgS ScHooL

of vETERINARy MEdIcINE, TUfTS UNIvERSITy (“cHILd

dEvELoPMENT: LINKINg HUMAN ANd ANIMAL HEALTH”)

with ordinary mice. Surprisingly, the teeth of mutant mice form their enamel coating faster than normal. The trou-ble is, the enamel is weak. In ordinary mouse enamel, there’s a strong crys-talline structure—“a beautiful prism arrangement,” as Thomas called it (he displayed an electron microscope image of what looked like a wall made of neat rows of bricks). By contrast, the teeth of the mutant mice exhibited a “significant disruption of that crystal.” In prelimi-nary tests, acid dissolved the D-starved enamel much faster than the normal enamel.

While the research doesn’t discount the importance of limiting sugar and good old brushing and flossing to con-trol cavities, it does point to another dimension of tooth care that dentists should start to address.

30075_6t29.indd 29 5/4/12 9:43 AM

on campus


shaggy-dog mannequin with movable joints is ready to be prepped for abdominal surgery. Models of four golden retriever heads, with jugular veins bulging from their rubbery necks, stand guard from atop a shelf. A furry feline facsimile, with

lungs that can draw in and exhale air, is ready to be rescued from the brink.The Muppet-like creatures are some of the teaching tools Jordana Fetto, V14,

used to equip the Cummings School’s new Simulation Center, where students practice their clinical skills on mannequins before they care for the real thing.

The daughter of an orthopedic surgeon, Fetto says her father “constantly drilled into me that surgery is very much a tactile skill. You can amass as much knowledge as you want, but if you can’t actually do the work with your hands, you’re never going to get it right.”

Seeking to develop the steady hands and muscle memory of an experienc-ed clinician before she heads into the hospital, Fetto worked with Angie Warner, associate dean for academic affairs, to set up the new simulation space with the help of a $10,000 grant from the Theodore W. and Betty J. Eckels Foundation. Thefunds paid for the cat and dog manne-quins, a life-size plastic horse and foam pads on which students can stitch as many as 30 wounds.

How lumpy teddy bears, rubber dogs and a plastic horse are teaching our students by Genevieve Rajewski

Perfect Practice

A

photo: ALoNSo NIChoLS

Jordana Fetto, V14, right, practices inserting a needle to draw blood from a dog’s foreleg in the new Simulation

Center, as Hillary Feldmann, V14, assists.

cummings school news

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Fetto, who plans on a career in small animal surgery, solicited additional dona-tions, including CDs and instructional booklets as well as surplus bandages, catheters, sutures and instruments from the Tufts veterinary hospitals and Novartis.

The Simulation Center, in the David McGrath Veterinary Teaching Laboratory, includes a few clever low-tech devices Fetto built with the help of assistant professor Alicia Karas, N85, V89, and lab coordina-tor Joseph Popowski.

One, a shoebox full of plastic sharks and lizards, allows students to practice manipulating small objects until their latex examination gloves feel as comfortable as a second skin. The goal is to sort the toys by shape into two cups—using only touch, not sight.

“It’s very easy to do with your bare hands,” says Fetto, “but it’s surprising to realize how much of your tactile sense goes out the window once you put on latex gloves.”

Another homegrown teaching aid—teddy bears stuffed with f lashlights and small rubber balls—helps students practice their diagnostic technique by palpating dif-ferent parts of an animal’s body. (Hint: The flashlight feels like a leg bone, and the balls mimic a foreign body or tumor.)

“You want to get to the point where, by the time you reach your fourth year [of veterinary school], performing procedures like this is rote memory,” Fetto says. “You want them to become something you do naturally, like tying your shoes.”

The adage pract ice makes perfect does indeed produce skilled veterinary clinicians, says Steven Rowell, V83, an assistant professor and director of Tufts V ETS, t he school ’s emergenc y a nd specialty-care hospital in Walpole, Mass. “As a school, we offer classes in clinical skills,” he notes, “and the Simulation Center helps students reinforce and polish the skills learned in those lab sessions and build their confidence before a patient is looking back at them.”

photo: kevLIN mA

Last fall she blew the university community away with her eloquent speech welcoming tufts’ new president, Anthony p. monaco. Chosen to represent students in the graduate and professional schools during monaco’s inauguration, Falon Gray, v13, a native of trinidad and tobago, regaled the crowd with a story of how she slipped and slid in her high heels when she arrived on the Grafton campus for an admissions interview during a typical New england winter—the polar opposite, if you will, of the tropical climate in which she grew up. “Amidst the mounds of snow and ice, I contemplated, ‘Falon, do you really think this is a good idea?’ ” Gray told the audience.

“As an international student, I chose the Cummings School because of its dedication to conservation medicine and the global network it had amassed to this same end, recognizing that there is a continuum between animal, environmental and human health,” she continued. “the reason I remain here is simple: the people.”

Her big plan: to advance public health in the Caribbean as an infectious-disease pathologist. “my [twin] sister got dengue fever, a mosquito-borne rheumatic disease, last year. It’s endemic to trinidad, and people die from it. thankfully, she survived. But that’s when it hit me: I want a job that impacts animal and human medicine.”

The role of animals in Trinidad versus the U.S: the veterinary profession is still relatively young in trinidad, and overall, there isn’t the same appreciation for the human-animal bond. “most people keep their dogs outdoors, where they serve as guards. When I first came to America, I had to learn that people value their animals as family members.”

Also, veterinary school is subsidized in trinidad, and when I told my parents that I got into tufts, I thought my father would be the first to say, ‘Come home, because we can’t afford it.’ Instead, he said, ‘If we can help get you there, we will.’”

How she’d broaden the reach of the Cummings School: Invite the wider world in. “We send dozens of students abroad every year. It

would be nice if the veterinary school made it easier for international students to spend time here, whether it be through scholarship money or another incentive.”

Where she got her screen-worthy name: the 1980s television show Dynasty. “my mother named me after a character named Fallon [Carrington Colby], who was devoted to her father. It’s fitting because I really love my father.”

Home Away from Home

Falon Gray at the president’s inauguration

Spend a few minutes with Falon Gray, V13

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hen we hear the word “tuberculosis,” we’re likely to think of a plague from the Middle Ages, or a poet dying of consumption in 19th-century Paris. Despite the perception that TB is a thing of the past, however, the contagious bac-

terial infection continues to have devastating consequences in much of the developing world. Tuberculosis now infects one-third of the entire human population, resulting in as many as 9 million new cases and 1.7 million deaths each year, according to the latest figures from the World Health Organization. Thankfully, 90 percent of people infected with the tuberculosis bacteria never contract the disease. Still, doctors and biomedical researchers are trying to understand why some humans develop TB while others do not.

“That’s the magic-bullet question,” says Gillian Beamer, an assistant profes-sor of biomedical sciences at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine. She is leading a research program to study the disease, focusing on two genetically different strains of mice—one that contracts TB when infected, the other that doesn’t. “I focus on how the [animals’] immune response fights the bacteria,” as well as the differences in TB-resistant and TB-susceptible mice, she says. “Someday, hopefully, the information can translate to humans.”

The bacterium that causes the disease, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, spreads through the air and can infect any organ in the body, though it is

most commonly found in the lungs. Onceinside the body, it burrows deeps into cells,including the in-fection-fighting white blood cells. When TB infection occurs, nodules known as tubercles or granulomas form. Patients lose weight and energy and develop a persistent cough—eventually coughing up bright red blood before suc-cumbing to the disease.

Tuberculosis has plagued humans since the Stone Age, and evidence of infection has been found in Egyptian mummies. In the Middle Ages it was known as the “white plague,” and in the 18th and 19th centuries it was the cause of a quarter of all deaths in the Western world. In the 1940s and ’50s, however, the availability of antibiot-ics and a new vaccine, effective in children, sharply curtailed TB outbreaks. “It was brought under control to a great extent and almost vanished from the population,” says Saul Tzipori, director of the infec-tious diseases program at the Cummings School. Assuming that TB was history, doctors stopped administering vaccines and declared victory.

But when HIV/AIDS emerged in Africa in the 1980s, TB re-emerged right along-side it, preying on the weakened immune systems of those with the human immu-nodeficiency virus and acquired immune deficiency syndrome. “HIV/AIDS created a whole new pool of susceptible individu-als,” says Tzipori, holder of the Agnes Varis University Chair in Science and Society at Tufts. “The microorganism stays dor-mant in most people, but flares up mostly because of a change in the immune sta-tus of the host.” Even that connection is unclear, however, because the majority of TB patients don’t have HIV. “Quite often there is no clear indication” for who devel-ops TB, says Tzipori.

When the New England Regiona l Biosafety Laboratory opened on the Cummings School campus in 2009, study-ing TB became a priority. Tufts recruited Beamer, who did her doctoral research on the disease at Ohio State University, where she looked at the amounts of certain cell-produced proteins that seem to control whether mice are more susceptible to TB. One of them, called interferon gamma (IFNg), appears to help the body fight TB

r e s e a r c h the path to discovery

Tuberculosis, the disease you thought was history, continues to be a scourge across much of the world by Michael Blanding

Rampant

W

Gillian Beamer is trying to answer the “magic-bullet

question” about why some people get tuberculosis

and others don’t.

photo: ALoNSo NIChoLS

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by “turning on” white blood cells to make them more powerful combatants. Another protein, called IL-10, seems to have the opposite effect, shutting down the immune system instead of stimulating it.

The research may help identify who in a population is susceptible to TB and who isn’t. “A blood test could be developed to identify some kind of marker for protec-tive immunity, and these are active areas of research by many investigators,” says Beamer. That could help physicians deter-mine which patients would benefit from the antibiotics used to treat TB. The antibiotic course currently prescribed is extremely complex and expensive, consisting of mul-tiple pills taken multiple times a day for six to nine months. Targeting their use to those most susceptible could help save resources, reduce side effects for patients and cut

down on antibiotic-resistant strains of TB that recently have begun to emerge.

Though humans are much more com-plex than the mice Beamer studies in her lab, it makes sense for a veterinary school to be conducting this research. “To me, humans are just one other animal,” says Beamer, who earned her veterinary degree at the University of Pennsylvania. “The specif ic protein reactions that happen in a cell can be different, but in a broad way, what happens on an animal level is very similar.”

As a veterinarian with expertise in ani-mal anatomy, physiology and cell biology, Beamer says she has “been trained to eval-uate the entire animal, so I have a slightly different perspective than people who don’t have that training.”

Beamer wants to expand her research to

look more closely at what happens to indi-viduals when they progress from a con-trolled infection to an active stage of TB. Her efforts could help in the global fight against the disease that includes attempts to develop a more effective vaccine, new anti-biotics to target specific strains of TB and less-invasive diagnostic tests (for example, using spit instead of drawing blood).

“Despite the many labs around the globe that are working on TB, there is still some basic information that is missing,” says Tzipori. “If we can generate a better under-standing about what happens between the host and the bug, then we can devise better measures for control.”

While those measures may be a ways off, the Tufts researchers are contributing to a multipronged attack designed to make TB history once again.

photo: IStoCk

Virus May Trigger Respiratory Ailment in Horses

An equine respiratory illness, which is similar to asthma in humans, affects anywhere from 30 percent to 80 percent of horses kept in stables in the United States. Researchers at the Cummings School are looking into whether the ailment, known as inflammatory airway disease (IAD), might be exacerbated by common respiratory tract infections.

IAD is caused by chronic exposure to the dust, molds and other allergens found in even the most pristine of stables, says melissa mazan, v93, director of the equine sports medicine program at the veterinary school. During an IAD flare-up, horses may experience nasal discharge, coughing and mild to severe exercise intolerance.

But what baffles veterinarians is that not all stabled horses develop IAD or its more severe cousin, known as heaves or recurrent airway obstruction. horses with heaves have so much trouble breath-ing that in the worst cases, they lose weight, unable to eat enough because they’re constantly gasping for air.

“people have long wondered if there could be a viral trigger—not that IAD is caused by a virus per se, but that maybe a virus makes the inflammation go crazy and causes the airways to become twitchy and hyper-reactive,” mazan says. “Interestingly, there has been a lot of research on this in human asthma. many trials have shown that if you’re an asthmatic, getting human rhinovirus is one of the biggest triggers for an exacerbation.”

Funded with a $25,000 grant from Boehringer Ingelheim vetmedica, mazan and her research team are working with clients of tufts’ hospital for Large Animals and referring veterinarians to study horses with previously controlled IAD that are now suffering

flare-ups. the horses receive free lung-function testing, as well as tests to confirm the presence of IAD and detect equine rhinitis virus, influenza and herpes virus, the most common equine respiratory tract infections.

If the study determines that respiratory viruses do indeed aggra-vate IAD, veterinarians may have a new treatment protocol for horses with even well-controlled lung inflammation.

“We would say these horses can’t afford to get a viral respiratory disease,” mazan says. She notes that preventive treatment would in-clude vaccination against influenza and herpes virus as well as ensur-ing that the animals don’t come into contact with other horses that might spread equine rhinitis virus, for which no vaccine is available.

have a horse that may qualify for the study? Contact mazan at 508.839.5395 or email [email protected].

Researchers are seeking to helpstabled horses breathe easier.

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a d v a n c e m e n t giving. growth. gratitude.

photo: BRIAN tIetz

nspired by two outstanding faculty members, Tim Knight, V99, and his wife, Judith, have made a gener-ous pledge of $50,000 to establish an endowed scholarship fund at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine.

The Chabot and Kumar Department of Anatomy Endowed Scholarship Fund recognizes the excellence and dedication of Joseph F. Chabot and M.S.A. Kumar, faculty members “who have made a real difference at Tufts,” says Knight.

Both have taught in the anatomy department for many years and mentored hundreds of students, including Knight, a physician who, at age 50, took a hiatus from his successful dermatology practice to pursue a veterinary degree.

“My wife and I have done well, and what better way to give back than to help our alma maters and establish an endowed scholarship

that will, in perpetuity, honor Drs. Chabot and Kumar, provide tuition assistance and help maintain the high caliber of the Cummings School,” says Knight.

“I consider myself a fortunate person because I am blessed with virtually limitless ambition and curiosity,” he adds. “I make my living with my medical practice, but I make my life helping my animal friends.”

“This is a wonderful tribute to our teach-ers and colleagues and a generous gift to gen-erations of students to come,” says the school’s dean, Deborah Kochevar. “Financial aid is increasingly important to us so we can ensure that students from all walks of life, with dedi-cation and talent, can pursue careers in veteri-nary medicine.” Jennifer LaPierre, V14, is the first recipient of the Knights’ scholarship (see story, opposite page).

Studying anatomy, considered the founda-tion of veterinary education and practice, gives first-year students the basics to evaluate, diag-nose and treat animals as well as perform sur-gical procedures. Students invariably describe anatomy as one of their most positive learning experiences at the Cummings School.

For Kumar, a professor of biomedical sci-ences, the scholarship speaks to the core excel-lence of the school’s curriculum: “This generous scholarship fund recognizes the significance of a strong basic science program in the D.V.M. pro-gram at Tufts. That is crucial for making a com-plete veterinarian who can contribute to the wel-fare of animals as well as basic science research.”

Chabot, who once convinced Harvard’s department of mammology to loan him some elephant bones for a course on pachyderm anatomy, retired in 2008, and is now confined at home by primary lateral sclerosis, a neuro-muscular disease in the ALS family.

“Dr. Chabot was always very dedicated to his students,” says Knight. “I and many others are proud of his accomplishments, and I am grateful to be able to establish this endowed scholarship in his name.”

Tim and Judith Knight endow scholarship to honor two veterinary faculty members

Tim and Judy Knight with two of the cats they have rescued.

Gifted Teachers

I

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s p r i n g 2 0 1 2 t u f t s ve t e r i na ry m e d i c i n e 35photo: ALoNSo NIChoLS

A Noble PuRsuiTKnight met his wife at the University of Missouri, where he was a medical student and she was in the nursing program. They estab-lished a dermatology practice in Hawaii, but both wanted to do more with their careers. For Knight, that meant a veterinary degree, and for his wife, certification in occupational health nursing.

“I went to veterinary school because I prefer to work with the more noble species,” Knight said, laughing. “I wanted to help at the animal shelters, but even as an M.D., [I] was not able to do anything medically significant without having a D.V.M. I applied to Tufts knowing that Tufts had, and still does have, a wonderful reputation for attention to the issues of animal well-being.”

After graduation, Knight completed an internship (he was a member of the first intern class) at the Cummings School and then worked part-time in the anatomy department with Kumar and Chabot and did part-time clinical work.

“Dr. Kumar is a gifted and dedicated anato-mist,” he says. “He continually amazed me with his extensive knowledge and intricate anatomi-cal drawings, which he did using both hands simultaneously.

“Dr. Chabot was my instructor in prob-lem-based learning sessions. We immediately developed a close rapport and have been good friends since.”

Today, Knight balances a busy dermatol-ogy practice in Florida (Judy is the office man-ager) with his passion for helping animals. The Knights have long been active in the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. As members of the SPCA board of directors, Judy Knight established a volunteer program and became the volunteer coordinator, and Tim Knight has volunteered in an SPCA clinic for the past nine years.

“Our SPCA work, in addition to philan-thropy, has involved working in the clinic doing primarily surgeries, including spay/neuters and skin and eye operations,” says Knight. “To be able to have helped many thousands of animals find homes is very gratifying. It will be a bright day indeed when the Cummings School offers a certified program with interns and residents in shelter medicine. My dream is to help this become a reality.”

—laura fergusonJennifer LaPierre, V14

The RighT CaReeR

the CUmmINGS SChooL WAS A NAtURAL ChoICe FoR JeNNIFeR LApIeRRe, v14,

the first recipient of an endowed scholarship established by Judith and tim knight, v99, in honor of professors Joseph Chabot and m.S.A. kumar.

Lapierre grew up in Sturbridge, mass., and studied biochemistry at Worcester polytechnic Institute. But when she contemplated a career in a research lab, it never felt quite right.

At the suggestion of a friend, she interned one summer at a small animal practice in Worcester run by Cummings School alumni Bart murphy, v83, and his wife, Anita trom, v84. She decided to become a veterinarian, and the couple convinced her she didn’t need to go far to find the best school.

“[Bart and Anita] are amazing people,” says Lapierre. “they love train-ing students and think tufts is an amazing place to go to vet school.” It is an assessment she now shares.

Lapierre says she’s been challenged and awed by her courses, espe-cially comparative anatomy. She has high praise for kumar, her anatomy mentor (“he is awesome; he knows everything”), and professor Larry engelking, who, she says, is “amazingly smart.”

her appreciation for the quality of her education continues to grow. She points to her clinical rotation in emergency medicine. “there is always something exciting going on” in the eR, she says. “the technicians and doctors have a perfect system in place to respond to anything. It’s like watching a play, and each one knows [his or her] part. then as soon as the animal is stabilized, there is something new to do.”

Lapierre says she never expected to be a veterinarian, although a childhood surrounded by a menagerie of pets undoubtedly cultivated an appreciation for even the smallest and most exotic of animals. “We had everything growing up—hamsters, snakes, turtles, iguanas, birds, cats, dogs,” she says, adding that she expects to practice small animal medicine.

As for the scholarship, her enthusiasm is unwavering. “I’m really thankful,” she says. “I not only have the financial support I need, but the chance to build the kind of career I was searching for. that is because of people like Dr. tim knight, who show how an education at tufts and the professors here can impact you for the rest of your life.”

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how To ReaCh usMain hospital switchboard and after-hours emergencies 508.839.5395Henry and Lois Foster Hospital for Small Animals, appointment desk 508.839.5395Hospital for Large Animals, appointment desk 508.839.5395Tufts Ambulatory Service, Woodstock, Conn. 860.974.2780Tufts VETS, Walpole, Mass. 508.668.5454Wildlife Clinic 508.839.7918Directions to Tufts (ext. 84650) 508.839.5395Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine Administration 508.839.5302Veterinary Student Admissions Office 508.839.7920Veterinary Alumni Relations 508.839.7976Cummings Veterinary Fund 508.839.7905Tufts Pet Loss Support Hotline 508.839.7966Continuing Education 508.887.4723Public Relations 508.839.7910

Website: www.tufts.edu/vet

If you are interested in learning

more about how you can support the

Cummings School of Veterinary

Medicine, contact: Jonathan Burton,

interim director of veterinary development

and alumni relations, at 508.839.7905,

or email: [email protected].

a s k t h e v e t advice for our readers

better to Control Ticks Than Vaccinate for lyme

ILLUStRAtIoN: WARD SChUmAkeR

Michael Stone, a staff veterinarian and clinical assistant professor at

the Cummings School, responds to a reader’s question about whether

to vaccinate her dog against Lyme disease.

Q: Our 4-year-old toy poodle was diagnosed with Lyme in April 2011, and treated with a standard antibiotic. Now we are trying to decide if we should have her

vaccinated with the canine Lyme vaccine. What are the risks and benefits of the vaccine—and your best advice about its use?

A: You ask about the benefits of the canine vaccine against Lyme disease. that is a great question. Unfortunately, veterinarians do not have a complete answer when it

comes to the vaccine’s effectiveness. Some research suggests that vaccination appears to be fairly good in preventing infection in dogs not previously exposed to the Lyme organism. I word this carefully, though, because your dog already has been exposed, and there’s no known benefit of vaccination after an initial exposure to the Lyme-causing bacteria.

You also ask about the risks of the vaccine. We have a bit more information about that, because veterinarians have been using it for several years. there is a very low incidence of side effects, less than 2 percent. As with most vaccines, reactions might include facial swelling, hives, itchiness, swelling at the vaccination site and, less commonly, collapse.

So what is my best advice? I do not routinely encourage vaccination against Lyme, even though I practice in a region where the disease is endemic. that said, I do not hesitate to administer the vaccine when a pet owner requests it, because I believe it is safe.

however, because I’m not convinced of its effectiveness in preventing Lyme disease, I would emphasize that tick control still remains important. there are other diseases that can be transmitted by tick bites—Lyme vaccine does not prevent those other infections. tick control for all dogs in tick-infested locations is more important than vaccination. there are both collar and topical products that are safe and effective in deterring ticks.

Please email your questions for “Ask the Vet” to Genevieve Rajewski,

Editor, tufts veterinary medicine, at [email protected].

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c a s e s o lv e d

For more information

please contact Tufts’

Gift Planning Office

888.748.8387

giftplanning@ tufts.edu

www.tufts.edu/giftplanning

Give BackGive Back& AheadLook

More than 30 years ago, John Gacher (right) and Federico Santi found a tiny, flea-covered kitten in a dumpster, brought her home, and gave her a bath. “She fell asleep on my pillow, purring so loudly,” says Federico. that kitten, whom they named Kitty, lived to be more than 20 years old. after she passed away, they were reluctant to think about adopting again. eventually, they decided to rescue another cat, Special K, who now has the run of their antiques store, the drawing room, in newport, ri.

John and Federico’s love of animals led them to the cummings School of Veterinary Medicine. they have included the school in their estate plans and their gift will support student scholarships. “We want to have a long-range impact on animals,” says John. “What better way to do that than to support education for veterinarians?”

“We can help future veterinarians.”

Resurrection

Barley reclaimed one of his nine lives late one night in the Tufts emergency room.

The 6-year-old cat arrived at the Foster Hospital in pretty serious shape: whimpering in pain, not eating or drinking, unable to walk without a wobble. His owners, Daniel plante and Elizabeth Hughes of Worcester, Mass., were plenty worried.

Barley’s rock-hard bladder made it clear he was suffering from a life-threatening urinary blockage, which is most common in young to middle-aged male cats. if not treated quickly, a cat can die from a ruptured bladder or from toxins in the bloodstream. The Foster Hospital Er sees up to 20 such cases a month. symptoms include frequent trips to the litter box, crying in pain, not eating and blood in the urine—things most owners mistake for constipation.

Kathleen Lindsey, the Er intern who diagnosed Barley’s block-age, said blood tests showed that the cat’s kidneys were flooding his system with excess potassium, resulting in a depressed heart rate. Barley received iV fluids to flush the toxins and increase his heart rate.

There was another scary moment when Lindsey told the couple that Barley had died, recalls Hughes. “she paused for what seemed like an eternity before adding, ‘But we brought him back.’ ” The cat’s heart had started beating so irregularly that it couldn’t push blood through the body. “Barley fell over and went into cardiac arrest,” says John Anastasio, the Er resident who resuscitated him.

now fully recovered, the feisty feline has resumed his favorite activity—swatting at water running from the faucet. The couple still marvels at how close they came to losing him. “it became life-threatening so fast,” says Hughes. “i am so very grateful this hospital was close to us.” —Genevieve Rajewski

photo: aloNSo NicholS

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veterinary medicine

On the FlyMichael McEwan, V14, photographed this dragonfly while walking his dog along the Charles river in newton, Mass. “That area is the closest thing to an outdoor hike [for us],” says McEwan. His image was among the 130 photographs submitted by Cummings school students, faculty and staff for an annual contest sponsored by the student organization WAZE (Wildlife, Aquatics, Zoo, Exotics). see more online at go.tufts.edu/wildthings.

escape from Farmageddon

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escape from farmageddon · for most of us, losing a pet amounts to a death in the family. our...

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