David Waltner-Toews is an epidemiologist, essayist, poet, fiction writer, veterinarian, and a specialist in the epidemiology of food and waterborne diseases, zoonoses (diseases other animals share with people) and ecosystem health. A professor in the Department of Population Medicine at the University of Guelph, he is the founding president and CEO of Veterinarians without Borders/ Veterinaires sans Fronti res - Canada (www.vwb-vsf.ca), as well as the founding president of the Network for Ecosystem Sustainability and Health (www.nesh.ca). He has worked in many countries, including Canada, India, Nepal, Indonesia, Kenya, Uganda, Guatemala, and Peru. Besides being an author on nearly 100 peer-reviewed scholarly papers, he has published half a dozen books of poetry, a collection of poems and recipes, an award-winning collection of short stories, and four books of non-fiction. He sometimes performs poetry in a special dress and kerchief (The "Tante Tina" poems). He thinks he might have lived long enough to have filched sufficient bits of wisdom to start writing mystery novels.