Veterinarian Thomas Gill pressed his torso into the side of a dairy cow waiting for a checkup. The 1,200- to 1,400-pound Holstein moved over a step, giving the Auburn vet room to place a stethoscope to her side.

The 11 cows waiting for a checkup at the Oakwood Dairy were packed in a tight row, their heads secured in place in a yellow stanchion. They had been pulled from the herd of 1,500 active milkers at the Aurelius farm for Gill's weekly visit to the farm.

One cow was running a 103-degree temperature, a degree and a half above normal. Others had reproductive issues requiring Gill to complete rectal exams of them with his arm encased in a fresh orange, arm-length plastic glove.

Gill gave some doctorly advice to herdsman, Brent Croscut, about improving the health of his bovine patients. One by one, their heads were released from the stanchion and they were able to walk away to join the rest of the herd milling in the barn.

Most of Gill's farm visit before the exam of the 11 ill cows had been dedicated to successfully getting healthy calves on the ground and having their mothers ready to give milk each day: the bread and butter of the milking industry. But his regular examination of cows exhibiting health problems at Oakwood Dairy is just one small instance of controlling disease-causing agents that can sow both economic devastation to agricultural operators and health crises if they spread from animals to humans.

As biosecurity has become both a media buzzword and a major focus of government and private disaster-contigency planning, veterinarians and farmers are at the frontline of defense in minimizing the spread of zoonotic diseases that are communicable between animals and humans.

“A lot of these animals are the sentinels of a disease,” said Kathleen Cuddy, the Cayuga County Department of Health's deputy director of health services. “Veterinarians might notice the outbreak of diseases before physicians would.”

Linking vets to the wider public health system is important because so many of the zoonotic diseases - anthrax and its ilk - also have the potential to be used as bioterrorism agents, said Dr. Bryan Cherry, the state Department of Health's deputy state public health veterinarian.

“Since 2001, there's been an increasing recognition of that need,” Cherry said.

The fall of 2001 brought not only the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on strategic locations in New York City and Washington, D.C., but also the first use of the anthrax bacterium in bioterrorism. Five deaths resulted when envelopes full of anthrax spores were sent to government officials and news organizations.

Cherry was hired three and a half years ago to spearhead an outreach effort between veterinarian professionals and local health department officials. Local health departments are now charged with arranging with local veterinarians to be ready to respond to significant zoonotic disease outbreaks, including the collection of animal specimens.

The testing of animal specimens will no longer be limited by a farm operator's insurance policy or willingness to pay. Now testing is mandated, but is covered in part either by the state or Cornell University's Animal Health Diagnostic Center.

Cherry said he has conducted outreach with all the veterinary societies in the state about the role vets should play in the public health system. In the local area, he spoke at a meeting organized last month at The Lodge in Skaneateles Falls by the Onondaga County Health Department and central New York's veterinary professional organization.

“I think in the past communications (between health departments and veterinarians) were weaker than they are today,” Cherry said. “The relationship between local vets and health departments revolved around rabies. We are getting everyone to recognize that vets are a lot more important to public health than just rabies.”

Gill, who practices out of his roving pickup truck and his Brookside Veterinary Clinic in Auburn, said he and other private vet clinicians put more eyes and ears on the ground for the public health system.

Like most other veterinarians, Gill is accredited to act as an agent of the state to respond to diseases. The accreditation authorizes them to sign off on simple medical tests like the Coggins test horse owners must get for their equines every two years if they are going to be transported on the roadways. It also makes them responsible for watching for highly virulent diseases that can cause widespread havoc to the food supply itself or to the safety of human lives.

“It's not that I know everything I need to know about Rift Valley Fever (an African viral hemorrhagic fever) or one of these exotic diseases,” Gill said. “I know how to get it started.”

The farm operators of Cayuga County can contact private veterinarians over animals that are exhibiting unusual symptoms, and if needed private vets can contact the state Department of Agriculture and Markets' veterinarians who are linked up with both state and federal resources, Gill said.

“I think we're very, very important in recognizing an animal disease immediately that needs to be reported,” he added.

Veterinarians need to not only work with public health officials but work with wildlife biologists to identify how both domestic and wild animals might be affected by emerging diseases like West Nile Virus or avian influenza, said Alfonso Torres, the associate dean for public policy at Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine and director until a couple weeks ago of the university's Animal Health Diagnostic Center.

“There is more and more awareness that the veterinary profession has the major contribution to public heath,” Torres said. “Many people see the veterinarian as taking care of my dog or cat or taking care of my cow or horse.”

Some veterinary and public health officials see these kind of efforts as the tweaking of an already extremely responsive system of handling diseases.

“We've got one of the best animal health systems in New York state ... we continue to make progress at a very rapid rate,” said John Huntley, director of the state Department of Agriculture and Markets' division of animal industry since 1989. His agency is responsible for the detection and eradication of communicable disease in livestock.

An example of that success story, Huntley said, is New York's freedom of tuberculosis and brucellosis in cattle since the early 1980s and in deer since the early 1990s.

In the 1940s, the federal government started a still-existing program of testing animals on farms and testing milk at collection points for tuberculosis and brucellosis. If any animal was found with the disease, the entire herd would be slaughtered. The dairy industry also began pasteurizing milk, killing the disease agents causing the two diseases. Over the decades, both diseases have been almost eliminated in the country.

Both diseases, however, have a wider presence outside of the United States, particularly in developing countries. Likewise, many emerging zoonotic diseases are originating in developing countries, said Torres, who in the past was the United States' chief veterinary officer and worked at the United States Department of Agriculture's Plum Island Animal Disease Center in Long Island. That is the only place in the country that conducts testing for foot-and-mouth disease, a highly communicable viral disease of ruminants that has devastated the United Kingdom's cattle and swine industries.

As the economies of the developing world grow, they will better be able to afford a protein-based diet instead of a starch- and grain-based diet; the United Nation predicts that between 2000 and 2020 there will be a 60-percent explosion of meat production in the word, Torres said.

The result is that more animals will be raised to meet protein dietary demands, but many of these counties do not have the technology to raise the animals in sanitary conditions, he said.

Like the spread of avian flu to dozens of countries in recent years, new emerging or reemerging animal diseases will likely threaten to spread intensely into the United States.

While the prevention of emerging diseases in developing countries is a large-scale issue of development of infrastructure, the United States already has a good infrastructure in place to prevent the entry of these diseases into this country, Torres said. The rigorous system of quarantine and import regulations is why foot-and-mouth has not yet arrived, he said.

“The United States has been very proactive in the long-term elimination of some of these diseases that could not only affect the production of milk and meat but provoke public health concern,” Torres said.

Technological advances also have helped in preventing the spread of these diseases, Huntley and Torres said. Speedy, time-sensitive testing is now available that no longer involves propagating a culture of a disease sample, allowing for the identification of a disease and the kickstarting of disease management right away.

“That has been wonderful for us in the business of being disease detectives,” Torres said.

Cornell's Animal Health Diagnostic Center is the only lab for the state conducting diagnostic tests of samples from livestock, domestic animals and zoo animals. It has 140,00 cases submitted each year. It has 250 staff members, most of them veterinarians or microbiologists, who conduct infectious disease testing, blood chemistry workups and toxicology tests. The center also is funded by the federal government as a regional center for testing; it conducts testing of any animal suspected to have bovine spongiform encephalopathy for a 12-state area.

On the state level, Ag and Markets also has developed preventive programs in recent years. The New York State Cattle Health and Horse Health Assurance Program have been promoting good biosecurity practices on farms since their 1996 start. Farms like the Oakwood Dairy voluntarily participate in the programs to have a risk assessment done of their operations and then implement preventive practices against the accidental or intentional introduction of diseases onto their farms.

The health assurance programs do not focus exclusively on the prevention of zoonotic diseases that present a risk to human health and the human food supply. They also focus on diseases like mastitis, inflammation of cows' udders, or Johne's disease, a bacterial disease of the intestinal tract, that dramatically impact milk production and affect how farms stay economically sustainable.

The state also is a participant in the national BSE surveillance program. Over 34,000 samples have been collected from New York cattle in the last two years.

Ag and Markets has 20 field veterinarians responsible for implementing a cadre of the department's programs. Licensed veterinarian technicians also work in the field, including in live bird markets in New York City hunting down avian influenza.

The state is also developing state animal response teams and county-level animal responses teams that would be ready during a major animal disease outbreak, a terrorist attack or natural disaster to shelter and take care of the animal population. No CART has yet been developed for Cayuga County.

The level of cooperation between farms and state regulators is at its height, Huntley said.

“We're working to affect disease control and understanding that business has to go on,” Huntley said. “They need to produce product. We're trying to design our programs in that context to allow flexibility to meet their business goals as well as their animal health goals.”

For all the regulatory frameworks in development, biosecurity will only be as effective as how cleanly and sanitary farming operations are in order to minimize cross-contamination of saliva, urine and feces between animals, equipment and humans.

Animals should be screened before being released into the larger herd. Extensive record-keeping is necessary. Foot baths are important when moving in between different barns on the farm and when moving in between farms.

Healthy animals are less likely to get sick, so proper ventilation, good nutrition, not stressing them out with overcrowding and vaccines to boost their immune systems are important, Gill said.

Healthier animals not only help with disease prevention but are more productive and help with the farm's bottom line, Torres said.

Staff writer Amaris Elliott-Engel can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 282 or at amaris.elliot-engel@lee.net