How Veterinarians Can Help Our Human-Healthcare Counterparts

Image from MASNA.org

Veterinarians have a lot to do with human health and much to offer our counterparts in human healthcare. Read more to find out what we can do, as veterinarians, to help inform human doctors and nurses about transmissible and non-transmissible diseases shared between humans and animals!

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1. Make human healthcare professionals aware that there is a State Public Health Veterinarian in their State's Department of Public Health who they can call any time with questions about zoonotic, parasitic, and vector-borne diseases. One of the main jobs of the State Public Health Veterinarian is to advise on these matters! They can help with everything from rabies to bed bugs to West Nile Virus and more. They work with public health physicians, epidemiologists, and other professionals with complementary expertise on a daily basis. They also have access to historical data about outbreaks and disease concerns in their state.
   
2. Encourage human healthcare professionals to ask questions about what kind of animals their patients interact with both frequently and infrequently. Do they have any pets? Backyard chickens? Are they a horseback rider? Does their occupation involve working with animals, such as fish, or are they a cat breeder? What if you diagnose your human patient with ringworm, but never found out they recently adopted a kitten from the shelter, so that they come back for recurrence? Infections like Psittacosis (Chlamydia psittaci) can cause illness ranging from flu-like symptoms to pneumonia in humans, and are hard to diagnose if the healthcare professional has no idea of the patient's exposure history to birds!
3. Many times human healthcare professionals recommend outright getting rid of a pet when concerned about allergies in their patient. If that is the only solution presented, the owner may develop bad feelings towards their doctor, lose a companion that had brought significant positivity into their life, or make no changes at all and have no opportunity to improve their symptoms. Instead of binary options, veterinarians can help human healthcare professionals out by suggesting changes to the owner's existing animal husbandry to minimize allergies. Committed owners have many options. HEPA-filters can be bought to filter dander from the air. Cage substrate of small mammals like pet rats can be changed into a less dusty or less allergenic option. Some types of pets can be moved from indoors to outdoors, with proper housing/environmental considerations provided. Floors can be changed from carpet to tile or wood that doesn't harbor dander, or carpets can be vacuumed. A house-cleaner can be hired to improve general cleanliness if the owner does not have time to do all the cleaning. A face mask, long-sleeve shirt, and gloves can be worn when interacting with or cleaning the pet's environment. Fabric couches can be switched out to non-cloth (e.g. faux leather) material, or washable covers can be used and washed often. Human healthcare professionals have other tools in their medical toolkit, too, for allergic patients such as daily antihistamines or allergy shots, that can be employed instead of outright getting rid of a pet. Of course, if these options are not feasible or if the owner has severe allergies/ anaphylactic reactions, it is best to rehome the pet.
4. Veterinarians help human healthcare professionals by preventing the transmission of disease to their human patients. We should always advise our clients about zoonotic diseases associated with their pet and how to prevent them, such as deworming puppies, hand-washing instructions for turtle owners, or techniques to stop their cat from scratching. As a veterinarian, you should always ask if there are any young, old, pregnant, or immunocompromised people in the home (a simple way to remember this is the acronym 'YOPI'). If so, it can affect our treatment plan. For example, instead of letting the family dog clear an asymptomatic Giardia infection on its own, we may opt to treat it in favor of reducing transmission risk to a family member who has an organ transplant. Similarly, it can drive our conversation with our clients in the exam room- we would spend time talking about the facts about Toxoplasma transmission if someone in the household was pregnant. When vaccinating, we may make different choices or recommend specific precautions, such as choosing a killed rather than a live vaccine when appropriate, or recommending no contact for a period of time between the YOPI individual and the pet.
5. Encourage our colleagues in human healthcare to read veterinary medical literature and offer help interpreting it or direct them to veterinarians with that area of expertise (e.g. veterinary specialists, veterinarians in academia). Almost all human diseases occur in animals, too, and can be diagnosed or treated similarly... but sometimes veterinary medicine offers innovative solutions that have not yet been thought of in human medicine (point human healthcare professionals to veterinary colleagues who have expertise in that area, such as veterinarians at Universities/Veterinary Medical Schools). In some cases, diseases that are rare in humans may be highly prevalent in certain groups of animals, and there may be more literature about that disease in the veterinary medical literature. Comparative medicine research makes strides in bettering our understanding diseases such as melanoma (humans and zebrafish have highly comparable pathogenesis), influenza (ferrets and humans have a similar distribution of receptors that the flu virus uses to infect the host), and much more. Best of all, these discoveries help us identify and treat these diseases better in both humans and animals.
6. Read and recommend the book and TEDtalk by human cardiologist and psychiatrist Dr. Barbara-Natterson Horowitz (M.D.). Dr. Horowitz is a faculty member at the UCLA School of Medicine and advocates for human and veterinary doctors working together to improve medicine for all species. In my experience, sharing Dr. Horowitz's talk has a greater impact on our human healthcare colleagues compared to tooting our own horn as veterinarians :)
   • Follow this link to see her 11 minute TEDtalk: https://www.ted.com/talks/barbara_natterson_horowitz_what_veterinarians_know_that_doctors_don_t
   • Below are examples of book covers of Dr. Natterson-Horowitz's book, Zoobiquity.