Dairy workers face significant occupational hazards including injury risks, and respiratory and infectious exposures. A major but understudied risk to dairy workers is transmission of zoonotic pathogens and antibiotic resistant bacteria. At the same time, dairy calves and cows require ongoing health surveillance and treatment for conditions including diarrhea, mastitis, injury, and complications of delivery. Despite calls for integrated approaches to worker health and safety and animal health and welfare on farms, it is not clear that there is ongoing communication or collaboration between worker health and animal health activities regarding infectious disease. On larger farms, there are often 3-5 designated, specialized workers who perform valued herd health tasks on a regular basis, including vaccination, examinations and diagnosis, and treatment (including antibiotic administration and intravenous drugs). At the same time, large farms have at least one point person (sometimes a manager) responsible for human health and safety for workers including safety training, OSHA logs, first aid, etc. There is great potential for these two groups to collaborate and play a key role in promoting infection prevention and control for both humans and animals on the farm in a “One Health” model. Such collaboration could also improve recognition and surveillance of infectious conditions. Under the recent pandemic state of emergency directives, farms (like other workplaces) were required to develop infection control plans for COVID-19 in the workplace. This requirement has now been lifted, but there is activity at the State level (Washington Labor and Industry) to develop a Washington Administrative Code (WAC), for infectious disease control in workplaces. There is a need for research to understand knowledge and practices of human and animal health workers on dairy farms in order to identify innovative and feasible approaches to developing and implementing infection control plans on farms to reduce risk of zoonotic infections and antibiotic resistance.
The aim of this project was to compare the awareness of infectious disease risks for dairy workers and animals between workers/managers responsible for bovine herd health and those responsible for human health and safety on WA dairy farms. We conducted key informant interviews and surveys with human and herd health specialists to assess activities and overlaps related to infection risks and other health issues and identify opportunities for interprofessional collaboration.
Peter Rabinowitz, MD, MPH, University of Washington