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Vector-borne and Zoonotic Diseases, Part Three : Leadership Overview

This is a full transcript of the online presentation. For the presentation itself, go here.

Presented by:
Carina Blackmore, D.V.M., Ph.D.
State Public Health Veterinarian
Division of Environmental Health
Contact Number: 850-245-4732

Hello, I am Dr. Carina Blackmore and I’m the State Public Health Veterinarian for the Department of Health. Today I am going to talk about the importance of partnering and looking outside the box when you prepare for a bioterrorism events, especially for preparing for zoonotic and vector borne disease events of a bioterrorism nature. And as a   example of this is the 2001 anthrax attack when a lot of the human clinical labs weren’t fully prepared too handle the specimens that were collected during that outbreak. But we have a number of anthrax experts in the veterinarian community in our country and they then were able to step in and provide a lot of expertise in the area and help out in the investigation.

There are a lot of areas in your community that may be focus for zoonotic disease transmission and I’m calling those areas hotspots. One thing you can do locally to prepare for zoonotic disease outbreaks or bioterrorism events is to find out where they actually are. Find out where the hotspots for mosquito borne diseases are, where the rodent infestations occur, where people come in contact with wildlife, where your veterinarian clinics are, if you have a large livestock operations, if you have a humane society, or animal control operation in your community where a zoonotic disease transmission may take place. It’s also good to know then and good to learn about the risks associated with those areas. Where would you most likely to expect a zoonotic disease outbreak to start? Knowing that of course then will help you plan your response.

In particular, let’s look at three hotspot types, vector intensive areas where, for example, you can find a lot of mosquitoes or rodents. Stay in contact with your mosquito control folks and also you can work with your community to make it safe and prevent vector borne diseases both from mosquitoes and rodents by removing stagnant water or rodent proof buildings for example. 

It’s also important to keep farms and livestock concentration in mind because attacks against livestock can be very, very costly for the U.S. economy. And also if you have zoonotic disease outbreaks in these areas the workers may be the first ones that come in contact with those outbreaks and also the first ones that may get sick.

So try to work with these farms and other areas. We have regional DACS veterinarians in the state that you can work with. Together with those try to approach the farms and train the employees on zoonotic diseases both the human science of these diseases and animal disease science and how to prevent them. And give them your phone numbers and make sure they are aware of the fact of the importance of their histories in tracking these outbreaks. It may be a little to difficult to work with the farms, because when we have large zoonotic outbreaks or large outbreaks in livestock herds one important way of withdrawing them is to call and quarantine them and that may be very costly for these farms. But try to get to know the people so that they trust you and they realize and try to convey to them that we certainly will try to work with time as much as possible, we both have the same goal. We don’t regulate them we just want to work with them.

Like I mentioned before, veterinarians are very important when it comes to bioterrorism preparedness and we know a lot about bioterrorism agents, many of them are zoonotic, and you should get to know your veterinarians in your community as well. Just like a human clinician may be the first to notices a human disease outbreak, veterinarian clinics may be the first to notice a zoonotic disease outbreaks that can be transmitted to people. Try to find out where the veterinary clinics are in your area and what kind of zoonotic diseases that they might be dealing with, and build relationships with them.

A good example of, again, where veterinarians played a really good important in discovering a natural disease outbreak was during the first phase of the West Nile outbreak. It was actually discovered by a veterinary pathologist who was a veterinarian at the Bronx zoo. And she started to notice there were a lot of corvids dying on her property and she was very worried about her zoo birds and they may become ill from this unknown illness. She pursued diagnosis and was able to find out the birds were dying of Flavivirus at the same time people in New York City were coming down with St. Louis encephalitis, which is what they thought was happening at the time, and that’s how the connection was made that we were dealing with a new virus, West Nile virus that than caused both veterinary and human pathology.

So how do you best reach out to veterinarians? Provide them with handouts with all the contact number that they might need. The state veterinarian in AG for example, AG law enforcement, USDA, and of course the numbers to the local health departments.

Try to include them in training scenarios that you have. You also might want to try to encourage veterinarians and clinicians to work together. Again with zoonotic diseases we really need to work hand in hand, medical doctors and veterinarians.

So in summary it’s very important to connect with people that are associated with hotspots in your community, try to get to know who they and partner with them. And then of course working with them, it’s important to do risk assessment of how important are these hotspots in your community as a potential bioterrorism hazard. And finally, when you have the risks assessments for your particular community, make sure that you add them to your county’s emergency response plan. It should be brief and readable, and it should also cover very specific information relating to vector borne and zoonotic outbreaks and how they might occur in your area. Also include what preparation your county has done for vector borne and zoonotic disease outbreaks and what kind of partnerships that you put in place.

So why do we emphasize partners here? Throughout this presentation we’ve been talking about partnering and the importance of partnering. Well when you have an emergency or a bioterrorism event you cannot get enough resources. You need to tap into all the resources you might have in your community to deal with the specifics for example of vector control, the specifics of the animal diseases that are connected to the zoonotic disease outbreaks. We need all the bodies and hands that we can get our hands on during these outbreaks as resources to make sure that we can control the outbreaks as fast as possible.

So in conclusion, it is very important that you include vector borne diseases and zoonotic diseases in you local response plan. And we here at the state health office are very glad to review those plans and provide input to those plans. It is also very important that you work with and partner with everybody in your community that may be associated with hotspots of a zoonotic disease on an ongoing basis and also when it comes to bioterrorism planning. And thank you very much for your attention.