Inflation, tariffs, AI, labor shortages, the odds of a recession: those are the usual suspects when someone brings up economic resilience. Rarely mentioned: whether wild animals are getting sick in ways nobody's tracking closely enough, and whether we'd catch it in time if that sickness started heading our way.
I've spent more than 25 years trying to answer that question, working inside veterinary hospitals, breeding facilities, and zoo diagnostics labs in Brazil and the United States. The earliest warning signs of a health crisis rarely show up where people are looking. They show up in animals first, sometimes in one strange necropsy report, sometimes in a pattern you only notice once you compare enough cases side by side.
What Recent Zoonotic Threats Have Taught Us
Public health emergencies rarely stay contained to hospitals. COVID-19 showed how fast a new disease can throw supply chains, labor markets, and trade into chaos. Bird flu has taught Americans a version of that lesson every time they check the price of eggs: federal authorities have tracked the outbreak since early 2022, and the toll by now includes well over a hundred million birds and a price tag north of a billion dollars in compensation, containment, and cleanup. Twice now, that toll has shown up directly in grocery store egg prices, since the virus has settled into wild bird populations as a year-round presence. Monkeypox told a related story, showing how quickly an illness can cross from one species and one country to the next.
I've kept a close eye on H5N1 myself, recently completing continuing education on H5 bird flu cases in pets exposed to raw milk and raw diets. A virus doesn't care about the line between wildlife, livestock, and the family cat; it goes through whichever door is open. Preparedness has to start long before it reaches people. The earlier we step in, the less it costs, in dollars and in lives.
Why Business Leaders Should Care
Wildlife disease surveillance might sound far removed from quarterly earnings. It isn't. Food security and farming sit downstream of animal health, and recent egg-price spikes are a small, visible taste of what happens when a disease that starts in wildlife spreads unchecked into commercial flocks. Fragile supply chains, tourism, insurance costs, and workforce productivity all absorb the hit when an outbreak escalates. Most companies already spend on cybersecurity and continuity planning because prevention is cheaper than cleanup; wildlife disease surveillance deserves the same treatment. It's not just farming,
either. Outdoor recreation, ecotourism, fishing, and forestry depend on wildlife staying healthy enough to hold up the ecosystems those industries are built on. A disease that thins out deer herds, songbirds, or coastal wildlife isn't only a conservation problem; it hits license revenue, wildlife tourism, and the environmental sustainability many local economies quietly rely on.
Wildlife Disease Surveillance: A Proactive Investment In Prevention
Wildlife disease surveillance means watching animal populations closely enough to catch new threats before they reach people, livestock, or the wider economy. In 2010, I co authored a study, published in Experimental & Applied Acarology, on tick infestations in wildlife in northeastern Brazil, which has been cited more than 80 times since; knowing where disease-carrying parasites circulate in the wild is exactly the kind of early information that lets officials intervene before a pathogen reaches domestic animals or people.
I saw this firsthand running the diagnostics unit at a zoological park in Recife, Brazil, where a string of animal deaths looked unconnected until we lined up the necropsy results side by side. The pattern pointed to poisoning, serious enough that we brought in law enforcement. That's what surveillance looks like most of the time: noticing today's case connects to last month's, before anyone else has put the pieces together. The same idea shaped the work I did later managing avian health programs at breeding facilities, building quarantine, prevention, and biosecurity protocols to stop diseases like Clamydiosis, Circovirus, and Polyomavirus from spreading quietly through a flock. By the time a disease shows up in an ER, or in the egg aisle, the cheap window to act has already closed.
One Health and America's National Priorities
The U.S. has come to recognize that new infectious diseases need a coordinated, cross disciplinary response. That's the idea behind the National One Health Framework, the government's current multi-year plan treating human, animal, plant, and environmental health as one connected system, with the CDC and USDA at the center of how it gets carried
out. My own place inside that structure comes through USDA-APHIS accreditation, held via the Veterinary Export Health Certificate System; accredited vets are the ones whose signature makes animal health paperwork valid under the standards the system depends on, and it is not automatic. It takes extra training and federal approval beyond a normal license, because moving animals across borders while tracking disease is serious regulatory territory, not routine paperwork.
For legislators, the takeaway is simple: this only works with steady, multi-year funding, not money tied to the news cycle. For entrepreneurs, that same gap is an opportunity, since diagnostic tools and data-sharing platforms for wildlife surveillance are still an underbuilt market given how much risk they help prevent.
The Role of Preventive Veterinary Medicine
Preventive veterinary medicine means catching problems early: steady monitoring, biosecurity, vaccination where it makes sense, instead of reacting once an animal is sick. Across zoo medicine, avian breeding, and now practice in California, I've watched this play out at every scale, such as managing the health of more than 3,000 animals across dozens of species at a single facility in Brazil. Good prevention depends less on any one technical skill and more on people talking across sectors that usually don't: wildlife groups, zoos, universities, public health agencies, emergency responders. Veterinarians are often the only ones with a foot in all of those rooms at once.
Recommendations for Strengthening America's Preparedness
Here's what I've seen actually work, and what hasn't.
- Fund wildlife disease surveillance as an ongoing program, not a one-time response. State wildlife agencies, university labs, and field veterinarians need steady funding for detection work, not crisis money after the fact.
- Formalize partnerships between universities, researchers, and government agencies. Research like the tick study I co-authored happens because institutions and regulators work together and stay funded between crises.
- Bring public health agencies in earlier, not just after an outbreak. The CDC and state health departments usually get involved once a disease has reached people; involving them sooner could shrink that timeline.
- Loop in zoos and wildlife rehab centers. They see sick and injured wild animals daily, an underused surveillance network.
- Treat the private sector as a partner, not just a funder. Agriculture, food production, insurance, and logistics companies have real money on the line and belong at the planning table, as they already do for cybersecurity information sharing.
Conclusion
The next zoonotic threat probably won't announce itself with a name, a headline, and a supply chain already unraveling. It's more likely to start small: a handful of odd cases in a diagnostics lab, or a pattern in wildlife data that only becomes visible once someone takes the time to look. Investing in wildlife disease surveillance now isn't just an investment in animal health. It's an investment in America's economic resilience, food security, and long term competitiveness.
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