Conover and Vail have created an awesome book which will be great reading for anyone working in the field of wildlife veterinary medicine; most likely reading that goes deep into the night and well past the responsibilities of the job. The book is sectioned to reflect seven types of diseases: bacterial, spirochetals, rickettsial, viral, fungal, prions and parasitic. This method of organization allows on to quickly locate the disease or vector of interest.
The chapters within each section cover specific zoonoses such as plague, brucellosis, tularemia and rat-bite fever to name a few. The wildlife discussed is quite carried and includes everything from rats to white-tail deer and everything in between which may carry a zoonotic disease. The chapters are formatted as follows: Introduction, Symptoms in Humans, Infections in Animals, How Humans Contract, Medical Treatment, what People Can Do To Reduce Risk, Contracting the Disease, Eradication and finally Literature Cited. This last section of each chapter is particularly important, especially to those performing literature searches on the disease discussed (for example Anthrax is referenced by 36 citations). The only thing to make this book less than perfect is the lack of color photographs which makes the identification of some of the animal species problematic.
As someone who is interested in zoonotic diseases both from a veterinary technology as well as public health angle, this reviewer will be enjoying this book for a long time. Because of the possibilities of spread of diseases from wildlife to domestic animals (an on to humans) this zoonotic cornucopia could be quite helpful to veterinarians, technicians, and most definitely students striving to make the connection and therefore understand the zoonotic diseases that are carried and transmitted by wildlife. For this reason, this book is a solid 5 star rating.
Publisher: CRC Press of Taylor and Frances Group (2015)
ISBN13: 978-1-4665-6214-1
VIN Bookstore: Currently Unavailable