I've been trying to figure out who I would talk to if I was a vet in Milwaukee looking for the public health department to report a zoonotic disease to.
Enter the internet:
City of Milwaukee's Public Health Links
This is broken down into sections:
1. government agencies, both state and federal
2. water - beaches, great lakes, EPA, hygiene
3. academic, including Marquette, UW Milwaukee, but also EINet (emerging infectious network)
4. resources - mostly CDC and Medscape's news-like service
5. biohazard and interesting randomness - more CDC sites, but also parasites, fungus, and aspergillus
Does this actually answer my question?
Um, no.
Now, there is the Milwaukee Public Health Laboratory. Sounds promising.
Let's see, they list a bunch of items in their mission statement: food safety, emergency response, disease surveillance...all good things, all good things, but where's reportable zoonotic diseases go?
How about MADACC? (Milwaukee Area Domestic Animal Control Commission, aka the humane society)
A little better -- hey, at least there's a list of how many pets you can have in a household.
Still not quite what I'm looking for, though.
Maybe I'm too focused. Probably just the state vet would do, right?
I'll do a search for "veterinary", there we go...
Hey, look, actual rabies guidelines! That's handy...okay, now what about other zoonotic diseases?
And, at long last, I find the reportable diseases page.
It splits them up between categories I, II, and III. Interestingly, the vast majority of Category II are zoonotic (not a surprise). Some of them I suspect are diagnosed not infrequently by veterinarians in animal patients; I do not know how often vets actually report these cases. For that matter, although I would think the state would be interested in the presence of these diseases in animals, I don't know that they do-- anyone remember hearing "Report your blasto cases here!" at the last WVMA convention?
