Publisher's Synopsis
Animal models are frequently used to elucidate mechanisms of disease and to control for confounding factors which are present in studies with patients with spontaneously occurring disease and to test new therapies that can be beneficial in both species. This volume entitled "Veterinary Allergy and Clinical Immunology" aims to review what is currently known in regards to allergic skin disease in the feline patient, with focus on non-flea, non-food hypersensitivity dermatitis. Various stressors, including both psychological as well as physiological, have been demonstrated to influence the immune response, presumably through activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and sympathetic nervous system. Anecdotal evidence, and retrospective and prospective studies, has demonstrated an effect of psychological and physiological stress on immune-based diseases. The distribution of various mammalian allergens has been extensively studied during the past few decades. Animal allergens were found to be ubiquitous in the human environment, even in places where no animals reside, with concentrations differing considerably between locations and geographical regions. This volume also depicts an overview of identified mammalian respiratory allergens classified according to protein families, and compiles the results of allergen exposure assessment studies conducted in different public and occupational environments. This volume also presents state of the art information on this increasingly important subject, covering the comprehensive text of allergic diseases affecting the major veterinary species. It will be a valuable guide for students, practitioners, clinicians as well as researchers. In this volume, the various models are discussed by focusing on the primary manifestation of allergy that they were attempting to reproduce and study. The infection typically responds favorably to medical treatment. In this volume, we focus on one developing approach to achieve this: to consider comparative immunology as the basis of initiatives looking to understand the biology of animal disease across several species and manage the potential for infectious disease transmission across animal and human populations. This approach allows us to take advantage of newly developed state-of-the-art technologies and the fundamental knowledge of immune defense mechanisms gained for species such as the mouse, and to increase transferability of resources across research nodes for veterinary species. We describe the link between immunity, animal health and disease and outline the role that comparative approaches can play as we move forward in our understanding of veterinary diseases and in the generation in effective strategies for their control and prevention.
