One Health lectures series kicks off with talk on the horse as a model for human disease
On Tues. Nov. 14, Michelle Barton, professor of large animal medicine in the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine, will be discussing the One Health impacts of her work on endotoxemia and heart disease in horses. The lecture, titled “The Heart of the Matter: SIRS, MODS, and the Colicky Horse,” begins at 3:30 p.m. in Room 175 of the Coverdell Center.
Barton is a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor in the veterinary colleges’s department of large animal medicine with an adjunct appointment in the college’s department of physiology and pharmacology. She has developed computer-based teaching aids to help students better understand and diagnose disease in horses, including cardiac arrhythmias and murmurs, and gastrointestinal conditions such as equine colic.
A particular area of interest for Barton is endotoxic or septic shock. Interestingly, endotoxemia is very common in horses with acute gastrointestinal disease (“colic”) and thus horses are a fantastic model for endotoxemia in people. Barton’s talk will review what we know about common sequelae to endotoxemia, the systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) and multiple organ dysfunction syndrome (MODS), and introduce a prospective clinical trial that focuses on heart function that is currently underway in horses admitted to the UGA Veterinary Teaching Hospital for acute surgical colic.
The One Health @ UGA Lectures Series aims to highlight efforts at UGA and the Southeast focused on interdisciplinary teaching and learning, research, and outreach at the nexus of human, animal and ecological health. It is supported by the BHSI Division of One Health. The next lecture in the series will take place Wed. Dec. 12 and will feature guest speaker Gregory Bossart, Chief Veterinary Office and Veterinary Pathologist at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta.