Safely Dealing with Infectious Disease

We start with recognizing the signs and taking the appropriate actions – but it doesn’t end there.

Featuring an interview with Dr. Linda Jacobson, Senior Manager, Shelter Medicine Advancement

Animals come into our care with different backgrounds and stories – they may have been brought to us from a compassionate caretaker, transferred in as a group from a remote community, or surrendered to us in need of urgent medical care. Regardless of their background, their health and safety are always a top priority.

With many years of experience of dealing with infectious diseases, we have developed a system that helps prevent disease outbreaks before they occur – and if they do occur, we have a process that helps to minimize the impact of the situation.

“We’re assessing risk before intake all the time because a shelter is a shifting population of animals from different environments,” explains Dr. Linda Jacobson, Senior Manager of Shelter Medicine Advancement at Toronto Humane Society. “So, we start off with a good understanding of where they’re coming from, and then we try to control for that. Animals that are transferred into our care, for example, we make sure they’re vaccinated before they come into the building. We also frequently know what kind of health problems they have.”

Animals who are transferred into our care in groups are housed together, in separate kennels, for their first 10 days. We do this to help protect the other animals in our care from anything unexpected that might show up within the first few days of settling in.

Helping Cats from an Overcrowded Organization Receive the Treatment They Need

In December 2022, our team set out to help Provincial Animal Welfare Services (PAWS) after they had to intervene at an overcrowded animal welfare organization. We agreed to help assess, and to bring in many of the cats that had been removed from the organization. When our team arrived at the site, they found approximately 250 cats living in a small, congested environment. In total, 45 cats were brought back to Toronto Humane Society and many of them had serious medical conditions. The others were sent to other animal welfare organizations around the GTA.

With this group of animals, we identified a rare disease outbreak with a bacteria called beta-haemolytic Streptococcus. “The thing about that situation was that we were able to identify an unusual infection that is typically only found in hoarding situations or severely overcrowded shelters or rescues, and that allowed us to appropriately treat the affected animals so that we could save as many as we could and make humane decisions for the ones that we couldn’t,” Dr. Jacobson explains.

Once we identified this unique disease outbreak, we reached out to the other animal welfare organizations that some of the cats went to so that they could identify and treat the disease correctly.

Because the cats who were brought into our care were housed together, we were able to readily identify which cats were showing clinical signs, who had been exposed to the disease, minimize the number of pets affected, and treat the ones that needed medical care.

Following strict, yet balanced, health and safety protocols with every animal that comes into our care is just one of the many ways that Toronto Humane Society Improves the Lives of Animals every day.