Disease Analysis Workshop

I choose to do my reflective writing piece on the second practical of the GICH track. During this practical, we were organized into groups and asked to evaluate the risk of chronic wasting disease transferring from Norway over to Sweden. Chronic wasting disease is a contagious, degenerative neurological disorder affecting cervids1. Each group was assigned a different risk factor: animal product import, people movement, import/movement of soil, plants, and plant products, the import/movement of live animals, and the natural migration of wildlife. Our group focused on the natural migration of wildlife.

Most of my peers found the disease analysis quite boring, but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. As a child, I was always interested in infectious diseases, and so I found this workshop to be right up my alley. I got to pretend to be a vet for an afternoon and give my professional insight on the situation. I was able to apply my previous knowledge of infectious diseases to help formulate the best advice.

Going into this workshop, I didn’t know how risk analysis worked, so I found the process very informative. Everyone in the room was able to contribute something, but our knowledge was very limited, and thus the entire process very subjective and prone to change. This changed the way I view knowledge provided to me from government officials. I’m not suggesting that I completely distrust published information, but on becoming more educated, I now take this information with a grain of salt. Understanding that as the public we demand answers, but as professionals, we can only provide so much, and what we can provide can continually be improved upon with further research.

As vets, our role is to practice medicine in animals, and in doing so, we become some of the primary people that the world looks to for answers during outbreaks. I found this workshop to be good, and fun practice for future use, as we most undoubtably encounter at least one outbreak during our career.