[Animal health and primary health care]

As part of the primary care strategy, the Governments of the Americas have included the agricultural and animal health sectors among the public health activities of the Plan of Action. This means that both sectors--agricultural and veterinary--must be guided in their work by a multidisciplinary and multisectoral approach, with full community participation. Hence, it is certain that both the study of veterinary medicine and the practice of the profession in the Region will have to be reoriented so that they may be more fully integrated with the primary care strategy. The reorientation of animal health activities is the subject of this paper. There can be no doubt that animal health has a vital part to play in improving the quality of human life and that veterinary practice itself offers excellent opportunities for building a sense of personal and community responsibility for the promotion, care, and restoration of health. Through their contact with the rural population while caring for their livestock (an integral part of the rural socioeconomic structures), the veterinarian and animal health assistant establish close bonds of trust not only with farmers, but with their families and the entire community as well; they are thus well placed to enlist community participation in a variety of veterinary public health activities such as zoonoses control, hygiene programs, and so forth. While the goal of the Plan of action is to extend primary care to the entire population, the lack of material and human resources requires that priority attention be given to the needs of the more vulnerable groups, including the extremely poor living in rural and urban areas. These are the groups at greatest risk from the zoonoses still present in the Americas. In the face of these facts, it is clear that primary care in the animal health field should be based on the application in each country of proven, effective, appropriate technology by personnel who, whether new or retrained, are well prepared for the responsibility. To this end, the veterinary public health sector should foster intersectoral coordination and technical and economic cooperation among countries, in addition to promoting (in schools of veterinary medicine) continuing education programs to train veterinary personnel for work in common with the other public health fields.