VN June 2021

Vetnews | June 2021 23 Gavin Reckless Thomson was born in Johannesburg, South Africa on 3 rd February 1943 and grew up in Zimbabwe (former Rhodesia). He matriculated from Milton High School in Bulawayo and qualified as a veterinarian at the University of Pretoria in 1966. He returned to Zimbabwe after graduating and spent three years as a state veterinarian under the conditions of his bursary and loan from the Rhodesian Government. In his third year of the veterinary course he had decided to become a virologist, and it is likely that his responsibilities in terms of controlling foot and mouth disease outbreaks in the field further piqued his interest in virology. In 1970 he obtained an MSc degree in Immunology at the University of Birmingham, UK, and on his return to Zimbabwe after that highly stimulating year of study he joined the staff of the veterinary laboratory in Harare (then Salisbury) where he set up a virology unit. In 1972 he obtained a position as virologist at the Royal Veterinary College of the London University, which enabled him to undertake a PhD study under the supervision of Prof Walter Plowright, a world-renowned virologist, on respiratory infections of Thoroughbreds, funded by the Thoroughbred Foundation, obtaining the degree in 1978. Gavin returned to South Africa in 1978 to take up an appointment at the Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute (OVI), where he was to occupy various positions, the last of which was Director of the OVI, until November 2000. After working with equine viruses at the RVC for more than five years he was strongly drawn to African horse sickness, but was instead given the task of research on viral diseases of pigs, with a strong focus on African swine fever. This was fortunate, as his groundbreaking work on the sylvatic cycle of maintenance of the ASF virus between common warthogs and the Ornithodoros moubata complex ticks that live in their burrows resolved the enigma of how transmission to ticks was accomplished by warthogs when their level of viraemia was too low to be infective. His research, involving experimental infection of warthogs, confirmed R. Eustace Montgomery’s pioneering research on ASF virus transmission in Kenya published in 1921. Like Montgomery, Gavin demonstrated lack of transmission to in- contact pigs by even acutely experimentally infected warthogs. Gavin also showed that consumption of the tissues of acutely infected warthogs was unlikely to be a major source of infection for domestic pigs. The practical laboratory work was performed at the Foot and Mouth Disease Laboratory, later the Exotic Diseases Institute, where Gavin worked from 1980 and of which he later became Director. His other important research involved the relationship between the Southern African Territories (SAT) FMD viruses and the African buffalo, and later other wild ruminants, with a focus on the populations in the Kruger National Park. He also headed the rabies research teamand, workingwith international collaborators, initiated technology at OVI that enabled a better understanding of the relationship between canid and viverrid biotypes of the rabies virus. Gavin’s scientific achievements were increasingly recognised nationally and internationally. In 1999 he received the Gold Medal of the South African Veterinary Association in recognition for outstanding scientific achievements and promotion of veterinary science. He served as Vice President of the Foot and Mouth Disease and Other Epizootics Commision of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) from 1994 – 2000 and was elected to serve as President of that Commission from 2000 – 2003, and to serve as a member of the Scientific Commission of the OIE from 2003 – 2006. From 1994 onwards he performed consultancies on the epidemiology and control of both FMD and ASF in several countries in Africa as well as Philippines, Pakistan, India and Mongolia. In March 1998 Gavin was appointed Director of the OVI after the Exotic Diseases Institute was amalgamated with it soon after the retirement of Dr Daan Verwoerd, but in November 2000 he resigned from that position to becomemore directly involved in epidemic animal diseases at international level. In December 2000 Gavin was employed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations (FAO) and seconded as the main epidemiologist to the Pan-African Programme for the Control of Epizootics (PACE), Eulogy – Gavin Thomson (3 February 1943 – 23 April 2021) >>> 24