fellowship and inspiration
Highly contagious diseases combined with close contact between animals in crowded spaces rapidly increases transmission risk. The high stress environments of disaster situations and evacuation shelters increases the risk of disease carriers shedding more infectious virus particles into the environment and make, even vaccinated animals, more susceptible to and they may experience more severe clinical disease.
There are a lot of reasons that a stressed animal may show signs of illness during the stress of a disaster - diarrhea, lethargy, lack of interest in food - only some of the causes are deadly. How will you know what is affecting your animal?
Employee health, resiliency and well being as a focal point, which is just outstanding to see. Maintaining a healthy baseline for your employees is the first step in ensuring that your teams have the capacity to think ahead, plan for contingencies, and recover from critical incidents. I appreciate the investment that your team makes in one another, and hope that your team culture becomes more common in the global work environment.
Responding to Dr. Andre's request for additional resources, I've gathered a few quick starting points below for your review. Each topic (first aid, de-escalation, workplace safety) can be their own freestanding line of discussion and training. The links here are some good starting points for the learning process, and while some are clearly for-profit enterprises, you can likely glean most of the core concepts from their online resources free of charge.
Disaster Exercise - June 2025
GoBag Prep
GoBag Supplies
Practice
The number, frequency, and scale of disaster affecting families (including those with pets) is increasing dramatically.
Education is advocacy, preparedness is care.
You can not keep your pet-family out of disaster, but you can plan and prepare to reduce their stress load or health risk exposure.
The Biosecurity Initiative within our Health Monitoring Program equips pet families with the tools and education to be prepared, agile and able to take action for their animal family member, even in turbulent situations.
The Biosecurity Initiative provides testing kits that allow pet guardians to make early detection, prevention, and containment decisions while also supported by veterinary guidance and educational support.
The detection and monitoring of infectious diseases through stress-free sample collection (e.g. feces, urine) by field-ready testing kits allow animal professionals and conscious animal guardians to proactively manage outbreaks and reduce the spread of contamination and disease.