The majority of emerging infectious diseases have an animal origin and pose a significant health risk to humans, wildlife, and domestic animals

The Kentucky Department of Fish & Wildlife Resources (KDFWR) received a $683,697 Project Grant award from the U.S. Department of the Interior Fish and Wildlife Service under the Zoonotic Disease Initiative (CFDA No. 15.069) program. The award will fund a 3-year project focused on four key areas: 1) Developing a fish and wildlife health database to enhance disease surveillance, monitoring, and forecasting; 2) Creating a wildlife health communication plan to improve information dissemination on wildlife diseases and zoonotic events; 3) Establishing new diagnostic service contracts to strengthen statewide capacity for detecting fish, reptile, amphibian, and aquatic invertebrate diseases, including an investigation of tick-borne zoonotic diseases; and 4) Providing zoonotic disease safety and outbreak response training for KDFWR staff and partners to support a network of trained volunteers for future wildlife disease event response. This project aims to increase KDFWR's ability to detect and respond to emerging disease threats, while building sustainable infrastructure including a database, communication plan, baseline health data, and a trained partner network.

There is a critical need to increase capacity for fish and wildlife disease surveillance, monitoring, and response preparedness to mitigate the detrimental impacts of zoonotic diseases. The kentucky department of fish and wildlife resources (kdfwr) proposes a project that will focus on four critical areas of need to increase the agencys ability to detect and respond to existing and emerging fish and wildlife disease threats. The first priority is to develop a fish and wildlife health database to enhance surveillance, monitoring, and disease forecasting activities and facilitate inter-agency data reporting. The second is to create a wildlife health communication plan to enhance the dissemination of information regarding fish and wildlife health and zoonotic disease events. To accomplish these goals, the agency will hire two full-time staff for the next three years, one as a data scientist to build a database and the other as a wildlife health communication specialist. The third area of focus is strengthening statewide capacity for the detection of fish and wildlife diseases by establishing new diagnostic service contracts for species that currently have no disease surveillance, namely fish, reptiles, amphibians, and aquatic invertebrates. This focal area also includes an investigation of the distribution of ticks and associated zoonotic diseases on wildlife management areas across kentucky, which will be used to guide kdfwrs occupational safety guidelines. Lastly, the proposed work will provide zoonotic disease occupational safety and outbreak response training for staff and the diverse group of partners that work with kdfwr. By standardizing training for staff and preparing partners, we can move toward establishing a network of trained volunteers. This network could be used in the future to respond efficiently and appropriately to a variety of wildlife disease events and outbreaks in a manner that prevents environmental contamination and mitigates risk to human investigators, wildlife, domestic animals, and the public. Overall, the proposed work aims to increase the kdfwrs ability to detect and respond to emerging disease threats and create sustainable infrastructure which includes a functional database, a wildlife health communication plan, baseline health data for under-represented groups of taxa, and a network of trained partners and staff to support future disease outbreak needs.