- Can you share your career journey and what led you to VCA as a DVM and epidemiologist?
- What does a typical day in your role look like?
- What makes you passionate about epidemiology and what is your favorite part about what you do?
- What other infectious diseases are top of mind for you that you are you also tracking right now?
- What are your thoughts on how your role influences One Health and human health?
As a kid, I always said I was going to be a veterinarian when I grew up. However, by the time I got into veterinary school, I knew small animal clinical practice wasn’t for me. I actually struggled a bit during my first year of veterinary school because I had worked so hard to get in and spent my whole life saying I was going to be a veterinarian, but at the time, my only idea of a veterinarian was someone who was hands-on treating animals. Luckily, during veterinary school, I started to learn about more non-traditional, non-clinical careers. I knew that I was interested in public health, infectious disease, and research. So, I applied to immunology PhD programs. However, by that time, I was pretty worn out from many years of school and, ultimately, decided not to pursue additional schooling at that point.
One of the career paths that I hadn’t known about until veterinary school was shelter medicine. During my clinical year, I got to spend time working in a variety of animal shelters and really fell in love with the work. I spent the first few years after graduation practicing as an animal shelter veterinarian. The work was really hard but incredibly rewarding. Still, I kept having this feeling that eventually I would go back to public health and research somehow. Eventually, I quit my job and went back to school to do the Master of Preventive Veterinary Medicine (MPVM) program at UC Davis and became a board-certified specialist in the American College of Veterinary Preventive Medicine (ACVPM). After that, I became VCA’s first veterinary epidemiologist and have been in this role for six and a half years.
One of the best things about my job as VCA’s epidemiologist is that there really isn’t a typical day. I get to work on so many diverse topics and the type of work I do for each can be very different. For example, in a single day, I may analyze antibiotic use data as part of VCA’s Antimicrobial Stewardship Program, create hospital guidance on an emerging infectious disease outbreak, and help one of our resident trainees hone their research study idea.
I am passionate about epidemiology because it encompasses both the methods to study disease and the tools to apply that knowledge to make real world change. I really enjoy the research process of starting out with a question to which we don’t know the answer and brainstorming ways that we could set up research studies to try and find an answer. Yet, some of my most satisfying work is when I can help our doctors and hospital teams by answering a question or doing research so that they don’t need to spend time on the response and can keep doing their job helping patients and clients.
Right now, I am carefully monitoring the H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza (bird flu) outbreak. Most bird flus primarily infect birds, as the name implies, but the current H5N1 version that is circulating in the United States has the ability to infect and make ill a variety of mammals, including cows, cats, and humans. Recently, there have been cases where pet cats have gotten very ill and died after eating raw diets (meat, milk) from animals that were unknowingly infected with bird flu. It is important that we educate our hospital teams about bird flu so that they can properly screen patients, know the right questions to ask clients, and where to turn to for diagnostic help. It’s also important to educate our clients and the pet-loving community so that they know how to protect their cats and birds. Part of my job is making sure that I keep up with ongoing bird flu developments so that I can help create up to date education materials.
One Health is the concept that the health of people, animals, and the environment are all inherently linked, and that we cannot solve health problems for one of these groups if we don’t consider all of them together. Even before people started using this term, veterinarians have always been involved in One Health and public health. For example, our companion animal veterinarians are practicing one health and supporting public health every time they give a rabies vaccine to a patient. In the early 1900s, there were hundreds of human deaths from rabies every year in the United States, but since we started consistently vaccinating dogs and cats, there have been fewer than 10 people infected each year.
Our lives are closely intertwined with our pets, and along with all the positives of pet ownership, our close relationships bring the opportunity to pass diseases back and forth. We saw this during the COVID-19 pandemic, where sick people were able to pass the virus on to their pets. Thankfully, most pets don’t get sick from the COVID-19 virus. Our close relationships and contact with our pets are some of the reasons that preventive medicine is such an important part of veterinary care. Things as simple as consistent parasite control for pets make it less likely that people will come into contact with tick-borne diseases or intestinal parasites that can be really serious in young children and immune-compromised people. When we are thinking about the health of ourselves and our families, it’s critically important to consider the health of pets as part of the One Health equation.
Visit here to learn more about the Covid-related study led by Dr. Anne Kimmerlein and VCA’s recommended a six-step framework for One Health collaboration, detailing how One Health organizations can integrate pets into a nationwide health response.
