animal medicine. Borstel, Germany, January 2009 Jindrich Kazda Editors'Comments The editors responsible for the chapters are listed under the title of each chapter. Authors are listed under the titles of subchapters. The references are listed as they appear in the databases Reference Manager (Thomson Reuters, Philadelphia) as imported from Web of Science (Thomson Reuters, Philadelphia) or PubMed (Medline, NLM Bethesda). A few citations, not indexed, were cited according to the reprints or books available. This principle resulted in minor differences in the titles (not all reference titles are in English, some references have capitalized title words, not all species names are according to the contemporary nomenclature and in italics). Some journals are cited with abbreviated titles, some in full, as available in the source databases. These differences were left in the format of the database.