Understanding disease transmission is paramount to our ability to combat disease, prevent its spread, and treat illness when it arises. The role of aerosol disease transmission, including droplet nuclei travel, is often a misunderstood and underestimated mode of disease transmission. As a result, veterinarians and veterinary infection control plans frequently fail to recognize measures aimed at this modality of spread. Thus, within the veterinary environment, if we take steps to limit aerosol disease transmission, we can protect our patients, humans, and the environment, protecting the human-animal bond and ensuring a One Health infection control plan.
In today's One Health climate, we must understand and address health hazards impacting our patients, staff, and environment. With the ever-increasing prevalence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), we must minimize infections at all costs. This starts in the veterinary setting with our hospitals, kennels, grooming facilities, daycares, and related venues. We must ensure our infection control program protects us to the best of its ability against infectious diseases, including zoonotic ones. We have a duty to not only reduce and prevent disease spread from one patient to another but also from animals to humans and vice versa. We do so with the utmost attention to our infection control plan.1–3
Aerosol disease transmission modalities
When considering the routes of disease transmission, we include direct and indirect means. These include:4
- Vector borne
- Mechanical transmission via fomites
- Vertical (sexual) transmission
- Direct contact (dermal exposure, g., catheter sites, incisions, bites, or other wounds)
- Ingestion (Fecal-oral route and including both food and waterborne illnesses
- Inhalation (droplet transmission and aerosolization)
Airborne disease transmission elucidated
Let's focus on airborne transmission, a mode we may be able to further protect against. Most people equate airborne disease transmission as equivalent regardless of the size of the particle-containing infectious material, the organism, or environmental factors such as ventilation and humidity. However, there is a distinction worth understanding between droplet nuclei transmission and true airborne transmission via aerosol. The distinction has to do with the size of the particles, the distance a particle may (or may not) travel, environmental conditions (indoor vs. outdoor and various parameters), and the ability of an organism to spread via aerosolization. However, understanding the distinction, recognizing numerous veterinary diseases fit in the aerosolization category and regular infection control measures such as PPE, routine cleaning, disinfecting, sanitizing, and laundering are not sufficient to prevent aerosol transmission of veterinary and human concern organisms is paramount.5
Thus, when considering measures of disease prevention and identifying hazards to the veterinary environment (e.g., veterinary clinics, grooming/boarding facilities, daycares), we can develop a more multi-modal and comprehensive plan when we fully understand the role aerosol disease transmission could play and how we may control/prevent this means of disease spread.
