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Columns::January 28, 2002
State budget proposal includes pay raises, other UGA priorities
Former White House chief of staff to speak at annual conference
Computational Center director wins chemistry award
UGA celebrates the life, legacy of Martin Luther King
Beyond description
Student ‘ambassadors’ visit area high schools
Signed, sealed, and delivered
A dollar could have bought a lot more
Newsmakers
Administrative Changes
Home Suite Home
Campus News
Vet medicine professor puts the bite on infectious animal diseases
By Dot Sparer
dsparer@vet.uga.edu
It’s the myth of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “It had been foretold. . . . Into each generation a Slayer is born. A Chosen One. One
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| Elizabeth Howerth has studied diseases in all kinds of creatures, from companion animals to wild animals to animals in foreign countries. (Photo by Peter Frey) |
born with the strength and skill to fight the vampires, to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their numbers.” And not only vampires, but “demons, monsters and just about every other kind of nasty that can come to mind.”
Although vampires are of little interest to Buffy Howerth, she does have the strength and skill to fight diseases in animals. Her particular interest is to stop the evil of infectious diseases.
(She has not used her real name, Elizabeth, for 48 years. “My father gave me the name Buffy when I was a baby. I have no idea where it came from.”)
Howerth has studied diseases in all kinds of creatures, from companion animals to wild animals to animals in foreign countries.
“Pathology is very broad. It encompasses a lot of things. We try to figure out what causes a disease, what the disease looks like in both a live animal and a dead one, and we try to figure out what the mechanism is for the disease--how it happens,” Howerth explains.
Most of this figuring out is done with autopsies, or necropsies as veterinarians call them. Howerth does six or seven necropsies in a typical afternoon and enjoys every minute. “It’s just fun being a detective--trying to find out what’s wrong with an animal,” she says.
The toughest part of her job, Howerth says, is “having three things that I’m supposed to be good at.” In a typical day she teaches in the morning, does necropsies in the afternoon, and “sort of cubby-holed in there is trying to do research.”
Second- and third-year students and grad students learn about diseases of the nervous system as well as bladder and kidney diseases in Howerth’s classes in the morning. Fourth-year students and residents participate in the necropsies in the afternoons, in quest of answers about life and death. Although Howerth is particularly interested in diseases of wildlife--especially whitetail deer--everything she teaches applies to all animals, from apes to fish.
The research she squeezes into her schedule--quite successfully, as it turns out--involves infectious diseases in whitetail deer, which she’s been studying throughout her 12-year tenure at the college. Some of these diseases also are found in humans. How do these diseases occur? And why? These are the questions to which she’s seeking answers.
Another source of investigation is a viral disease in horses, cattle and pigs which occurs only in the Western hemisphere. “It’s thought that an insect transmits the disease,” says Howerth, “but we’re looking into that.”
In between her residency in pathology at the University of California at Davis and her Ph.D. at UGA, Howerth spent three years in South Africa at a veterinary research institute in Onderstepoort.
She spends free time with her children, and swims and plays the piano. But her chosen career is still number one. “It’s just sort of a passion,” says Howerth about pathology, a subject she’s been interested in since studying veterinary medicine at Michigan State. “I really like to study disease, so the reward for me is to be able to come to my job in the morning and love what I do.”
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