The challenges for surveillance and control of zoonotic diseases in urban areas.

The world is rapidly changing in many aspects concerning veterinary medicine, and man-animal relationships in urban areas represents a real challenge for the profession. Unlike the vertical approach of the academic teaching tradition, veterinary urban hygiene needs a strong holistic-epidemiologic support. Year by year, new animals, new animal uses, new fashions, new zoonoses, and new problems appeared amplified by media with the duty of the public veterinary services to solve them. The practical experience of many years of these continuous challenges is now concentrated on a new health sector: urban veterinary hygiene that now calls for a multidisciplinary and intersectoral collaboration with other professional categories to guarantee human, animal and environment health.