Although the lessons learned are different for each stakeholder group, Yvette Johnson-Walker, DVM and senior lecturer in the Department of Veterinary Clinical Medicine at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine, says lessons are always learned when practicing veterinarians, livestock producers and allied industry come together for a foreign animal disease tabletop exercise.
In fact, participants are often surprised at the complexity of disease response and the number of agencies and legal authorities involved – state and federal Departments of Agriculture, Transportation, Natural Resources, Public Safety/Law enforcement, Public Health, Environmental Protection, and more depending on the nature of the disease outbreak, she said in a campus release.
With a grant from the USDA, Johnson-Walker and two other faculty members from the College of Veterinary Medicine recently conducted trainings to better prepare state animal health officials to respond to these types of foreign animal diseases. In March, Johnson-Walker, Gay Miller and Will Sander traveled to New Hampshire to facilitate a tabletop exercise that simulated a coordinated response to an introduction of African swine fever (ASF).
The Illinois team hosted 50 participants, including animal health officials from all six New England states, USDA representatives and personnel from state public health agencies and environmental departments. Through a hybrid format, participants worked online and in person at the New Hampshire Audubon Center in Concord, N.H., to better understand how they would coordinate their response if ASF came to their region. The eight-hour exercise was a big first step in setting up mechanisms needed to coordinate the multifaceted response that would reach into all aspects of the agricultural community, the release said.
Many animal health regulatory agency personnel have had recent experience in emergency response due to the recent H5N1 outbreaks. Still, the tabletop exercises provide decisionmakers with an opportunity to network and plan with the variety of partner response agencies in the absence of an emergency.
“We have taken a regional approach to these exercises because regulatory authority often differs across jurisdictional boundaries. Regional exercises provide a low-stress environment for personnel to problem solve across boundaries and enhance response capability. Regional response planning provides an opportunity to share best practices and learn from the experiences of others,” she said.
The Illinois team has also led similar trainings in Maryland and Florida within the past year. Johnson-Walker said she always learns something new with each exercise.
“Although the structure and organization of emergency response has been standardized, each response is unique,” she said. “For each exercise, we consider the nature of the local livestock production system, animal movements, susceptible wildlife species, feral livestock, transitional farms, cultural differences, recreational activities, and human movements all of which impact the risk of introduction and spread of infectious disease and effective control measures. Even within the same location, these factors may differ substantially across susceptible species.”
Johnson-Walker has been working on disease response training since the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the United Kingdom. She admitted a lot has changed since then. In the past, there was less interest in preparing for something that had never happened.
“Many people were convinced that we would not face a large-scale infectious disease outbreak in our lifetime. The experience of widespread outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in poultry and the rapid spread of porcine epidemic diarrhea virus has changed that perspective. Everyone is recognizing that the issue is not if we will experience a widespread infectious animal disease outbreak but when. Now people are much more willing to take the time to prepare for a potential outbreak,” she said.
The pandemic has helped emphasize the importance of response plans that consider supply chain disruptions, Johnson-Walker added.
“After facing these widespread outbreaks of human and animal disease, emergency response planners are also much more aware of the mental health cost of disease response. Livestock producers, regulatory agency personnel, private veterinary practitioners, and the general public experience mental health consequences when animals are depopulated to prevent spread of disease,” she said.
