[.ca] Veterinary Parasitology Reference Manual (ISBN 0813824192)

An OK Parasitology teaching guide for classroom use:
This book has its place as a basic general student Parasitology textbook, which I suspect may be its intent... When compared for overall content to other parasitology reference manuals, such as Georgi's Parasitology for Veterinarians (an excellent reference for professional veterinary use if looking for the parasite's background, though not for its ID) I'd give it about a "C" rating. However, I simply cannot recommend this book for use as a reference guide for specifically identifying the parasite eggs or oocysts seen on a microscope slide. Why? One reason is that many of the eggs in the book are artists' hand-drawn, stylized renditions. These cannot compete with actual photographs, wherein the nuances of fine photographic detail set one species of worm egg apart from often quite similar eggs of other species... And, there are inconsistencies in the presentation... On one page, for example, a few hand-drawn egg illustrations show the comparative size of various egg species. Actual size of egg type 'A', for example, is noted to be somewhat smaller than that of egg type 'B'. A few pages later, however, egg 'A', the smaller of the two on the comparative size page, appears in a photo to be about 4X larger than egg type 'B', shown in another photo on that same page. This is critical because often two species of eggs can be so similar in appearance that to accurately determine one species from another for proper eradication, size really DOES matter! Some of the egg photos that are available (and not all are), such as the Haemonchus contortus egg, are of poor quality, thus of no real use for reference... There has been an ongoing livestock parasite management crisis lately on an international scale, because lack of a good photo ID reference book has caused eggs from other worm species to be mis-identified as those of Haemonchus contortus. The egg of one specific and very nasty worm, a Liver fluke called Fasciola hepatica, is often misidentified as Haemonchus, but it unfortunately does NOT respond to the same wormer that wipes Haemonchus out. As a result, the Fasciola hepatica worms, treated with wormers that kill off Haemonchus, refuse to die! The host animal is then determined to be harboring a 'resistant' strain of Haemonchus, and is recommended for culling. But in this book the egg from the Liver fluke is actually found many pages away from the Haemonchus egg, and listed under another host species altogether. Sadly, as a reference to be used for accurate identification of the eggs/oocysts of internal parasites seen on a microscope slide, this book cannot take the place of the out-of-print 1st thru 5th Editions of Sloss' Veterinary Clinical Parasitology.

This book saves me money!:
If you want to reduce your livestock health costs by doing your own fecal exams for parasites, this book is full of information and photos that you cannot do without! Thanks to the spiral binding, it lies flat beside my microscope for easy reference and accurate identifications. I use mine monthly!

Parasitology:
This book was very useful while studying veterinary parasitology. There are large photos of most eggs which make studying for lab praticals helpful. In addition it is divided into sections by animal so you can see the most common parasites for that particular species. Each parasite also has a discriptive life cycle diagram next to it. I would highly recomend this book as a helpful addition to the parasitology lab.

Nicely Done!:
OK, I admit that I am just a little biased in this review - My dad is the author and I took some of the pictures that illustrate it! That doesn't change how much I think that this is a very handy (and comparatively inexpensive) book to have. It is copiously illustrated with both drawing and photos and is divided up by the host animal. Personally, I end up referring to this book at least once a week and have heard many of the vet students that I know say about the same thing. So, if you are a vet student or work in some field that comes into contact with parasites, I would say that you need this book. It is designed to be used, not kept on the shelf, and it deserves to be. Exceedingly streamlined and useful - especially the concise descriptions of each parasite illustrated by a photograph :). Cheers!

An excellent addition to the veterinary literature:
This is the 2001 fifth edition of a book first published in 1989. That alone tells you that veterinarians like it. To me, it is a rather surprising book. It is divided into 17 sections, the first devoted to methods of parasitological diagnosis, 14 devoted to parasites of every kind of mammals and birds (domestic, wild, and in-between) and reptiles, and 2 to artifacts and tables. The sections devoted to animals include clear drawings and excellent black and white photographs of the diagnostic elements for the common parasites (eggs, larva, spcimens, etc.), drawings of the life cycles, lists of the common antiparasitic drugs with dosis and indications, list of the zoonosis associated with the respective animal, and a very brief summary of the morphology, importance, diagnosis, treatment, and sometimes prevention of each parasite. For the abundance and quality of the photographs, one tends to consider this books as a diagnosis manual, but it is much more. It becomes closer to an encyclopedia of important practical issues of veterinary parasitology, condensed into 235 pages, at a ridiculous low price. Whom is useful for? Certainly for the veterinarian who wants to identify a parasitic infection but also for someone who needs to remember the latests treatment or some forgotten detail of a parasitic infection. I suspect that it should be quite welcome by the veterinary student who pays due attention to the lectures and then wants a condensed summary of the important points. A surprising book but very good and useful indeed