David Waltner-Toews (1948-) is a Canadian epidemiologist, essayist, poet, fiction writer, veterinarian, and a specialist in the epidemiology of food and waterborne diseases, zoonoses and ecosystem health. He is best known for his work on animal and human infectious diseases in relation to complexity.
A professor in the Department of Population Medicine at the University of Guelph, he is the founding president of Veterinarians without Borders/ Vétérinaires sans Frontières, and founding president of the Network for Ecosystem Sustainability and Health.
Besides about 100 peer-reviewed scholarly papers and a textbook (Ecosystem Sustainability and Health: a practical approach, Cambridge, 2004), he has published half a dozen books of poetry, a collection of poems and recipes, an award-winning collection of short stories (One Foot in Heaven), a murder mystery (Fear of Landing) and a book about the natural history of diseases people get from animals (The Chickens Fight Back: Pandemic Panics and Deadly Diseases that Jump from Animals to Humans).