Canterbury vet probes viral disease mysteries

Press, 24 January 1986, Page 11

Canterbury vet probes viral disease mysteries

One of New Zealand’s brightest vets, Dr Robin McFarlane, will leave for the United States next week to resume an academic and research career in viral diseases and in particular foot-and-mouth disease. Robin and his wife Robyn, both from Canterbury, will live on the eastern end of Long Island, New York State, to be handy to Robin’s work at the forbidding Fort Terry, Plum Island, which is the centre of foot-and-mouth research for the United States Department of Agriculture.

The fort was a munitions store for the United States Army and has stone walls which are feet thick. Like New Zealand’s Soames Island, Plum Island offers some isolation from the mainland to facilitate disease and quarantine work.

Robin’s Ph.D. has landed him a position of molecular virologist In charge of developing a genetic probe for detecting the presence of foot and mouth disease, the world’s number one viral disease of animals.

The present detection methods are either not very sensitive or involve inoculation into live animals.

“We need a sensitive and easily administered test,” he said in Christchurch last week. Canterbury farmers will remember Rob McFarlane from his periods as a club veterinarian, at Ashburton for one and a half years in the early 1970 s and on Banks Peninsula from 1977 to 1982. But his wanderings have taken him far and wide since graduating at

Massey University in 1971. After working in Ashburton, Robin travelled through Asia and Europe until he landed in the United Kingdom. He passed the exams for membership of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons and worked in Wales for a year.

The itinerant vet than wandered into Africa where he spent two years as a lecturer in veterinary clinical studies at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, which contains one of four vet schools in the African continent Rob remains impressed by and anxious for Africa because he found the two years in Nairobi very enjoyable and would love to return.

It was the beginning of his Interest in Third World people and animals and was an intro-

duction to the study of inter-country aid, which he has persued since. “The range of teaching was probably less than in a western vet school but it was practical and appropriate. “The graduates mostly went into Government positions throughout Africa where they were dealing with the big animal diseases, such as foot-and-mouth, and the large vaccination programmes which are necessary.”

He returned to Banks Peninsula which, while it might have been a considerable contrast to Nairobi, he found very enjoyable for the range of vet practical work and the friendships made. His wife Robyn (formerly Studholme) comes from Christchurch, where she qualified as a registered nurse. They have one child with another expected soon. Robin’s brother, Chris McFarlane, is now the vet on the peninsula.

The brothers come from Winchester where their parents have a farm and the boys were educated at Timaru Boys High School and Massey. A holiday through the United States during 1980 raised the possibility for Robin of post-graduate work which might broaden his experience and possibly his usefulness to Third World agriculture.

He decided to go to the University of Missouri, Columbia campus, to the microbiology department of the well-respected vet school. From a range of topics he chose for his

doctorate the molecular virology of Aujesky’s disease, the widespread and economically important viral disease of pigs. During three years at Missouri, Robin had a considerable amount of “course work” or lectures and laboratories, which is usually not the pattern in New Zealand Ph.D studies. He had to go back over some of the allied fields, such as biochemistry, which he had studied at Massey but not used much since. But he also took units in topics such as international agriculture and tropical agronomy which he felt would be very useful upon a return to an aid project or vet work in Africa. He learnt Spanish too. His doctoral work, however, looked specifically at latent infections of Aujestky’s disease,

where pigs may be carrying the virus within their brain tissue without ill effects until a trauma or stress activates it and results in problems for the pig such as abortions.

Until the virus is stimulated to break out it may remain hidden in an altered form, Robin said, and he used genetic engineering tools to find its presence.

Viral research is big news world wide at present, with the outbreaks of human herpes and A.I.D.S. Some of Robin’s research was applicable to human medicine also and his freedom to experiment with animals contributed to the general. understanding of viruses, he believes. Molecular virology as a speciality is in demand and Robin will continue his work with a change in disease, to foot-and-mouth.