Alvaro Aguilar-Setién

Much of my professional career has focused on zoonotic diseases, and mainly in the study of rabies that has allowed me and my group to gain experience in working with wildlife (bats, procyonids, etc.) as well as domestic animals (dogs, cats, goats, etc.). As seen in some of the peer-reviewed publications, my group has been one of the first to have done experiments in bats (1998), before it was discovered the importance (in the first years of this century) of those animals as reservoirs of several emerging diseases affecting humans. I have a special interest in the study of human-animal interface-environment within the concept of One Health. My current situation as a veterinarian, senior researcher, in a human hospital center in Mexico, is privileged to study zoonotic diseases as a whole, since we have access to clinical cases of patients arriving from throughout Mexico, as well as wild and domestic animals. After our rabies studies, our experience in handling wild mammals has led us to diversify our collaborations with different groups of United States, and Europe, working with other microbiological agents as Orthopoxviruses, Hantaviruses, Dengue, and Coronaviruses, as well as, in reproductive control of rabies vectors (vampire bats and dogs). In Mexico, we interact with the wild animals’ branch of the Ministry of Environment and the “Instituto de Biología” of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Our projects have resulted in more than 170 peer-reviewed publications.