Ohio Country Journal In 2017, as I was preparing for the board exam for the College of Veterinary Preventive Medicine, I spent long days buried in textbooks and long evenings in small-group discussions about hypothetical disease outbreaks. These tabletop scenarios covered everything from foot-and-mouth disease to zoonotic threats, and one in particular still sticks with me: a SARS-like coronavirus spreading rapidly across the globe. Our group debated control measures, tracing the possible path of infection, and brainstorming how to slow it. We quickly ran into a grim reality: limiting human movement enough to meaningfully contain such a disease would be extremely difficult. Our best hope, we concluded, would be the rapid development of an effective vaccine.
At the time, it was just an exercise, but within a few short years, that “what if” became a “right now,” as COVID-19 unfolded in real life and tested the world’s ability to respond. Now, with the highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) outbreak in dairy cattle, we are facing a different kind of challenge, one that is exposing specific weaknesses in how our industry handles novel disease threats.