Jonna Mazet, DVM, MPVM, PhD
(Photo by Gregory Urquiaga)

At the annual Joseph Leiter Memorial Lecture held earlier this month, guest speaker Jonna Mazet, DVM, MPVM, PhD, talked about her specialty—diseases that jump from animals to humans.

“Most of the infectious diseases that we see today like Ebola, MERS, even Zika originated from an animal host,” she told the audience. “How can we stop them or stop them from expanding their range?

“If we’re successful, no one would know. . . .Wouldn’t that be a great problem to have?”

To learn more about what Dr. Mazet called a “pretty crazy challenge,” you can listen to the lecture in its entirety via NIH videocast.  

Dr. Mazet is director of the One Health Institute and Wildlife Health Center at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. She also co-directs PREDICT, part of USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats program to predict and prevent global pandemics.

Sponsored by NLM and the Medical Library Association, the Leiter Lecture was established in 1983 in honor of the Library’s first Associate Director of Library Operations, Joseph Leiter.