Matt Moore
Faculty and students in the College of Veterinary Medicine are interacting with colleagues in Iraq to teach veterinarians different skills as well as restructure the country’s veterinary system.
After the collapse of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime, some professors from universities across the country joined in an effort to rebuild their veterinary system, and Internet technology is helping students at N.C. State communicate with and learn from Iraqis thousands of miles away.
Video helps educate zoo workers, students
A program in the veterinary school is giving students the chance to help their counterparts in Iraq at the Baghdad Zoo. The new system installed in a classroom allows students and teachers to link up with veterinarians at the zoo and answer their questions, according to Dr. Suzanne Kennedy-Stoskopf, research professor for the vet school’s Department of Clinical Sciences.
Kennedy-Stoskopf and her husband, Dr. Michael Stoskopf, also a professor in clinical sciences, are in charge of the program at N.C. State. The project got started when Scott Willens, a former graduate student, was deployed to Baghdad and began helping to rebuild Iraq’s agricultural system.
“He realized that the Iraqi people enjoyed visiting the zoo, and it was a place that they could go to try to escape what’s going on in their country,” Kennedy-Stoskopf said. “It was a place to congregate that had happy memories.”
According to Kennedy-Stoskopf, Willens contacted colleagues at NCSU. With the help of North Carolina Zoo Director David Jones, who has experience rebuilding the Kabul Zoo in Afghanistan, they were able to raise money to purchase the computers and software necessary for the school to connect with the Baghdad Zoo.
Initially, the program had to overcome a few hurdles, both technological and political, Kennedy-Stoskopf said. Early in the program, she said the team faced problems with the zoo staff not being able to even get to their computer due to curfews and security.
When they were able to get everyone in the right place, the class could only communicate with the zoo by holding signs in front of the camera because the sound would not work, she said.
According to Kennedy-Stoskopf, the biggest challenge was to get the Iraqis enough bandwidth to allow them to connect with the classroom.
“We had a lot of pixilation, a lot of breaking up, a lot of freeze-frame kind of interaction, and we could not hear them, though they indicated they could hear us and see us.” she said.
The team was finally able to tweak the program over spring break so when students returned, she said they were able to communicate with the zoo. Kennedy-Stoskopf said last week was the first class that the Iraqis started asking questions — about topics like frostbite in animals and building reptile houses.
“It’s so basic compared to what we do, but it’s real,” she said. “Those are the real kinds of issues they’re faced with.”
The link, Kennedy-Stoskopf said, will help students know what problems real veterinarians have in other parts of the world.
“There’s a lot of interest in N.C. State students about international experiences or outreach internationally,” she said.
According to Stoskopf, it brings the real world into the classroom.
Conferences held to rebuild
Faculty and students at the veterinary school are also involved in projects involved in rebuilding Iraq, according to Dr. Prema Arasu, director of Veterinary Medicine International Programs.
Arasu has been to two conferences in the region to help facilitate a restructuring of the veterinary system there, she said.
The conferences were initiated by an Iraqi-American veterinarian in the United States, Mo Salman, professor of epidemiology at Colorado State University.
“He’s the catalyst,” Arasu said. “He has connections [in Iraq]. There was a need for restructuring.”
An initial meeting was held in Kuwait that Arasu said included the Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges, the American Veterinary Medical Association, the U.S. Army and the USDA along with invited Iraqi and Afghan veterinarians.
After the first conference, she said the necessity to address both countries veterinary needs separately was evident.
According to Arasu, the Iraqis decided at the first conference that they wanted a scientific workshop to “identify gaps in our knowledge and to work with [the U.S.] to develop things forward.”
Arasu got involved in the second conference, she said, which was held in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil in 2006 and dealt solely with Iraq’s needs for improvement in its veterinary system.
The conference was also an important first step for restructuring because it allowed higher-level veterinarians to communicate with those in private practices across the country, which she said usually does not happen.
One of the biggest challenges for the team from the U.S. was providing the Iraqis a new way to think about their profession.
They made them think first about what each needed at an individual level, she said, and then worked up to problems facing the veterinarians at a national level.
Under former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Arasu said veterinary medicine was controlled by the government.
“They had no sense of private power,” she said. “What could they do as individuals? What could they do as private entities? What could they do as non-profit organizations? They had no sense of that.”
Because of the success of the first workshop, a second was held — this time in Syria due to cost and security issues.
The second workshop was held to identify five main diseases affecting both animal and public health in the country, she said.
According to Arasu, the five main diseases identified were avian flu, tuberculosis, brucellosis, foot-and-mouth disease, and the echinococcus tapeworm.
Since Arasu is a professor of parasitology, she said she worked with the veterinarians on eradicating echinococcus.
Steps taken at the conference included recognizing that they need to have running water to clean these facilities, separate places to dispose of hazardous remains, and at a higher level, creating new laws and operating procedures for safe agriculture handling, she said.
With some of these diseases, she said the problem was a lack of regulations for slaughterhouses.
“With the disease that I worked on, which is echinococcus, they would get livestock coming for slaughter that would have these huge cysts and they would recognize them as not for human consumption and they would just cut those off and throw them over the wall and then the stray dogs would eat those and that’s how the life-cycle continues,” Arasu said.