Читать книгу Infectious Disease Management in Animal Shelters - Группа авторов - Страница 16

For all its benefits, infectious disease control is only one goal of a successful shelter medical program. The production medicine model, developed in the context of commercial animal husbandry enterprises, proves surprisingly applicable here. The successful livestock veterinarian understands their role extends beyond treatment or even prevention of disease. Rather, they provide guidance to help the production system reach a variety of goals, which may include such things as providing a healthy, safe food product, ensuring that the enterprise is financially sustainable, providing good welfare and maintaining compliance with relevant regulations. None of these goals may be reached at the expense of another.

Similarly, the shelter practitioner must approach the task of disease control with an understanding of the mission of the organization, its goals, requirements and priorities. The true art of shelter medicine involves balancing risks to best serve overall objectives, especially those that are potentially in conflict with one another. Balancing isolation and confinement for infectious disease control with allowing exercise, social interaction and contact with adopters is just one example.

The recommendations in this text aim to highlight some of the ways in which risk and reward balance in a shelter vary in comparison to other contexts. Methods are suggested to mitigate risks while maximizing the shelter's ability to meet their goals. Paradoxically, veterinarians can sometimes best contribute to overall shelter success by recommending practices that are seemingly less cautious rather than more when it comes to infectious disease control. For instance, routine quarantine of healthy‐appearing incoming animals is commonly recommended in herd‐health contexts to screen for animals that may be incubating disease. However, the increased length of stay (LOS) this practice entails, along with the increased population density as well as the cost and staff burden that results, often undermine other goals of the shelter such as judicious use of limited resources and rapid movement of healthy animals into adoptive homes. Alternative strategies to limit disease introduction, without the need for quarantine, include accurate history taking when possible, the performance of careful intake exams and vaccination, daily rounds and monitoring, optimized sanitation procedures and appropriate and prompt use of diagnostic testing. These topics are covered in more detail in Chapter 2 on Wellness and elsewhere in this text.