BEVA Awards reward veterinary excellence

Equine vets, students and a Trading Standards officer have been rewarded for their efforts and achievements at this year’s British Equine Veterinary Association (BEVA) awards.

Seven awards were presented at the 2013 BEVA Congress, held last week (12 September).

The BEVA equine welfare award — sponsored by Blue Cross — went to Professor AM “Mac” Johnston, who has offered advice and guidance in the Scottish Highlands for many years. Mac is a widely published author and was a lecturer in equine medicine at the Royal Veterinary College.

Dr Alan Nixon of Cornell University won the BEVA Richard Hartley Clinical Award for his research on subchondral cysts. This award is in memory of Richard Hartley, who was a founding member of BEVA and president from 1974 to 1975.

Co-authors Benjamin Jacklin (RVC) and Ian Wright from Newmarket Equine Hospital collected the BEVA Trust Peter Rossdale Equine Veterinary Journal open award for their paper on fractures in throroughbred racehorses.

The BEVA Trust Queen Mother award was won by Adele Williams from the University of Manchester who reported on her visit to SPANA — an international working animal charity — in Mali, West Africa, during January 2012.

The Voorjaarsdagen and BEVA Award went to Nicky Van Der Vekens of the University of Ghent for her paper “Atrial natriuretic peptides detect cardiac dilatation”. This was first presented at the Voorjaarsdagen Congress in Amsterdam in April 2013.

And Graham Capper, senior enforcement officer for Wrexham Trading Standards, was rewarded for initiating and running targeted multi-agency enforcement checks to tackle long-distance transport of horses in Europe, winning the BEVA Trust/FVE equine transport enforcement award.

A further award for the best clinical research project given at the congress will be announced soon.

For further information visit www.beva.org.uk