Growing Conservation Medicine in Australasia

Abstract

The discipline of Conservation Medicine emerged in the 1990s in North America in response to an increasing awareness of the impact of human activity on ecosystem health and the need to broaden our approach to understand the complex interactions between human, animal and environmental health. In 2004 a meeting in New York was convened under the title of 'One World, One Health' - a first attempt to formulate the principles that underpin Conservation Medicine - the so-called 'Manhattan Principles'. Over the last decade these principles and the discipline of Conservation Medicine have gained significant traction and are now being actively promoted, on the global scale, by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OlE) among others. This paper outlined the relevance of this discipline to Australasian wildlife conservation and biosecurity, and described some of the key developments in the growth of the Conservation Medicine paradigm in this region. The role of the New Zealand Centre for Conservation Medicine (NZCCM) as a hub for facilitating trans-disciplinary collaboration and the professional development programmes being pioneered by Murdoch University were described