This multivolume handbook presents the most authoritative and comprehensive reference work on major zoonoses of the world. The Handbook of Zoonoses covers most diseases communicable to humans, as well as those diseases common to both animals and humans. It identifies animal diseases that are host specific and reviews the effects of various human diseases on animals. Discussions address diseases that remain important public and animal health problems and the techniques that can control and prevent them.
The chapters are written by internationally recognized scientists in their respective areas of disease, who work or have worked extensively in the most affected areas of the world. The emphasis for each zoonosis is on the epidemiology of the disease, the clinical syndromes and carrier states in infected animals and humans, and the most current methods for diagnosis and approaches to control. For infectious agents or biologic toxins, which may be transmitted by foods of animal origin, a strong focus is placed on food safety measures. The etiologic and therapeutic aspects of each disease important to epidemiology and control are identified.

The book describes the natural history of myxoma virus in American rabbits and the history of its introduction into European rabbits at length. The changes in rabbit and virus over the last forty years provide the classical example of coevolution of a virus and its vertebrate host and a paradigmatic model for the understanding of an emerging infectious disease. Rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus has been spreading in Australia for only three years, but in some areas has been very effective. Written by leading world experts in animal virology and the history of medicine.

The outbreaks of myxomatosis among rabbits in Australia in 1950 and in Europe in 1952 provided scientists with opportunities of observing the course of the interaction of a very lethal virus disease with a large population of highly susceptible mammals, i.e. with a model system to study the evolution of an infectious disease, and the effects of an infectious disease on the evolution of a mammal. This scientific account of the spread of the disease in Australia and Europe, of its effects upon rabbit numbers, and of the genetic changes that occurred in parasite and host, is of great interest to ecologists, virologists, parasitologists, mammalian zoologists, geneticists, agriculturists, and public health workers, as well as to those directly concerned with rabbit raising or control.