The students of the University of Veterinary Medicine Budapest held a talk introducing students to wildlife medicine.

Over 60 students, from both Hungarian and International courses and all the different years, joined us for this meeting. It started with a presentation from students Anne-Maud Dupuy-Roudel and Charlotte Guis about the European Wildlife Disease Association and the European Association of Zoo and Wildlife Veterinarians, and the advantages of these organisations for students aspiring to pursue a career in the field. They also did a retrospective review on multiple workshops and conferences attended by students from the university in the previous year, and how much knowledge they had gained from them.

Then we had a talk by Dr Károly Erdélyi, who has an MSc in Wildlife Management and Game Biology, a PhD, and is a Diplomate of the European College of Zoological Medicine (Wildlife Population Health). He is currently the head of the Laboratory of Mammalian, Wildlife and Poultry Pathology at the VDD of the National Food Chain Safety Office. Dr Erdélyi has a broad international experience and has participated in a wide range of conservation and research projects, has published extensively in the field of wildlife diseases and zoonoses on topics such as the West Nile Virus or Avian Influenza.

He shared with the students his career path from veterinary university, through the different projects he accomplished over the years, up until his current work on infectious diseases. He taught the students the importance of herd health when dealing with zoonoses, and the role wildlife plays in the control of diseases – how to look at the bigger picture, to focus on the population and not on the individual.