David Waltner-Toews

David Waltner-Toews (born 1948) is a Canadian epidemiologist, essayist, poet, fiction writer, veterinarian, and a specialist in the epidemiology of food and waterborne diseases, zoonoses and ecosystem health. He is best known for his work on animal and human infectious diseases in relation to complexity.
Profile.
A University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Population Medicine at the University of Guelph, he is the founding president of Veterinarians without Borders/ Vétérinaires sans Frontières - Canada, founding president of the Network for Ecosystem Sustainability and Health., and one of the founding members of the Community of Practice for Ecosystem Approaches to Health – Canada.
Besides about 100 peer-reviewed scholarly papers and a textbook ("Ecosystem Sustainability and Health: a practical approach", Cambridge, 2004), he has published half a dozen books of poetry, a collection of poems and recipes, an award-winning collection of short stories ("One Foot in Heaven"), a murder mystery ("Fear of Landing") and a book about the natural history of diseases people get from animals ("The Chickens Fight Back: Pandemic Panics and Deadly Diseases that Jump from Animals to Humans"). In 2011 he collaborated with artist Diane Maclean on her exhibition "Bird" at Killhope North of England Lead Mining Museum, contributing a new poem, "The Love Song of the Javanese Singing Cock"
Work.
Waltner-Toews is best known for his initiatives to integrate human, animal, and ecosystem health in research, practice and teaching. This work, bridging natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences, has drawn considerably on the ideas of post-normal science, as developed by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz. He has been instrumental in the development of ecohealth teaching and training manuals for North America and Europe as well as Asia .