vet chalenges

Veterinary Medicine is one of the most difficults careers, with a lot of challenges that needs to be faced in order to succed an become good veterinarians.

First of all wich I think is one very importante challenged in my discipline is in the technology area, because there are not too many machines in clinics that are made for animals. actually, in the clinics they use human machines to take the exams and to mesure the constants of the animals (temperature, pressure, etc). It does not exist technology specially made for the animals.

The second area that I wanna tolk abut, is in the social-matter, because in Chile the animals have no rights because they are considered as things, and things have no rights because they don`t have duties. So they would never be taking seriuosly or be respected, unless you are an animal lover jaja, and you really care about them.
Another social matter related to the discipline, is that now there are a lot of veterinary faculties, from public and private univeristies, wich increases the number of profesionals in the field, it is more competitive and dificult to find a job, being minor clinic the most required job.

what can we do in order to solve this chalenges?
In the first case, what needs to be done, obviuosly, is to design the same machines used for humans, but for animals, machines that had the same function, but specially made for them, because animals are not like humans, they have a different anatomy, their bodies have different temperatures, they are smaller and more fragil than us.

And for the social matter, thats very hard to improve when ir comes to the animals rights.
But for the competition of jobs, we will have to prove that we are the best, that we come from a better univesity and that we are more prepared for the job than the others. This is something that we are the only ones that can solve it, for what I said before, that we have to show that we can do it and we are better than the competition.

what else needs to be said about education?

The education is one of the main problems in our country nowadays. With a government that does not want to hear what the students had to say.

I am not totally aware of the problems with the scholarships and credits, that is one of the things that the students are protesting for, so I won`t talk about it.
But what I can say, is that I think that the problem begins in the schools, even there the education is not fair to everyone, the public and private education are very far away one from another, reaching very different PSU`s scores, the result of this is that the ones that can pay for a better school education get in better universities (Universidad de Chile, Universidad Católica, Universidad de Santiago, etc) leaving behind people as smart as them but with less resources.

And another big problem that our education has, is definitely our government (honourable mention to out minister of education Joaquín Lavín), and the way that it has to resolve the problems and the way that they repress any kind of manifestation or free expression.

To finish, I think that the problems that we are facing now are not easy or quick to solve, they require a lot of patience, understanding, power of will, among a LOT of things, and most of all TIME.

Animal Testing

This article talks about how to minimised the animal testing by considering the three Rs, wich are:  replacement, refinement and reduction. The aim of this three Rs is to find alternatives to avoid animal suffer, by not using them alive in the experiments, or by using a smaller number of animals, and trying not to stress them and make them suffer during the experiment.

Here are some replacement for animal experiment:
1- LAL (limulus amoebocyte lysat) assay:  this test detects toxic compounds in drugs, proucts and devices. Replacing the use of live rabbits.
2- cells culture and stem cells (cells that can turn into any body cells): Animal and human cells can grow in a lab, this allows scientist to test for toxicity.
3- computer models: they predict the effects of chemicals on the body.

The AXLR8 iniciative, launched by the European commission, identifies areas of research that could lead to refinement, reduction and replacement of animals in research. One goal of this iniciative is to use fewer, and one day no animals in experiments.
A notice on the AXLR8 webside said: "Current reliance on high-dose animal toxicity studies … is a source of uncertainty in human health risk assessment... Conventional animal tests are, in general, quite time consuming, costly in both economic and animal welfare terms, and offer little mechanistic understanding of how chemicals act in the body." and adds "instead of focusing on signs of gross toxicity at high doses in living animals, an alternative, '21st century' approach advocated by leading scientific and regulatory authorities … is to work towards a mechanistic understanding of how chemicals interact with cellular  response pathways in the human body at environmentally relevant exposure levels".
The European commission hopes that advances in biology (molecular and cellular) will progress in the search of the replacemen to animal experiments.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/31/animal-research-alternatives