Help fill out this survey - Research on Environmental Sustainability

Hi everyone! My name is Stephanie Schiavone, and I am a 2nd year DVM student at Colorado State University. Last semester I joined a class that actually turned out to be an amazing way for myself and several other students to get our feet in the door with research. Our class mentor, Dr. Colleen Duncan, told us we should seek out a sustainability project we are passionate about. All of us decided on sending out a survey to every AVMA accredited veterinary school with an associated teaching hospital on environmental sustainability in the workplace. The survey is designed to target all employees and students who are undergoing clinical rotations. Our goals for this project are to discover where within the hospital there was a lot of non-sustainable waste being produced and how to better address it to see where changes can be made. Our hope with this study is to publish it to JVME so that we can start to make more sustainable changes in our hospitals and design a better future for ourselves, our furry companions, and our non-furry companions. I hope you can help me by taking 10 minutes out of your day to take this survey. Thank you all so much! 

https://tinyurl.com/VTHSustainability 

sschiavo@colostate.edu

Vet Students Impacting Environmental Health

Daria Hagan from Kansas State

I am participating in an ornate box turtle population survey with Sunset Zoo in conjunction with six other AZA facilities in Kansas. We conduct line transection surveys at two different sites, twice each per month when the weather is warm enough for turtle activity. Any box turtles that we find are measured, weighed, and marked so that they can be identified if found again. We also keep track of location, which may help with determining preferred environment or movement patterns. Ornate box turtles are rather difficult to find in the wild so no one is sure about their current population status. Motor vehicle collisions and collection from the wild may pose a significant threat to the species, but we need an understanding of their population in order to understand the level of threat. The population survey will continue for two more years and the results could help to implement regulations preventing public collection from the wild in order to protect them. Although most of my time with the project is spent hiking through long grass trying to tell the difference between a rock and a shell, our team has a lot of fun working together. We know that the information we gather will help protect our state reptile and their habitat for many other species.

Vet Students Supporting Environmental Health

Are you interested in getting more involved with environmental health and wellness? Read below about what Kaitlyn Denny and her classmates at Michigan State University are doing to help veterinary medicine become a little more environmentally friendly!

Last year, myself and a group of my classmates started the SAVMA Environmental Wellness Committee. I served as a co-founder and the first chair of the committee. Our goal is to help bridge the gap between veterinary medicine and the environmental issues our world is facing. We strive to provide education and tools for CVM students to be responsible stewards of our planet. We hosted various talks and events throughout the semester to encourage sustainability at MSU CVM. We started an initiative of bringing reusable containers for lunch/dinner meetings to decrease waste, brought more recycling bins to the CVM, and hosted speakers about animal agriculture, plastic waste, and the effects of climate change. We also we able to get funding to gift students with bamboo toothbrushes and reusable produce bags. These small items serve as a daily reminder that even the smallest of actions in our daily lives can have profound effects on our environment.The efforts of this committee are vitally important in today's world and I have learned so much from being the inaugural chair.

Vet Students Impacting Environmental Health

Charlotte Weisberg, University of Pennsylvania

In the spring semester of 2019 I took on the position of Environmental and Sustainability Coordinator in the student-run One Health Club at PennVet. As a brand new position, the responsibilities were ultimately up to my own discretion. I immediately took this as an opportunity to improve the local community here at PennVet and our collective mindset toward environmentalism. The initial focus of these projects was improving waste management at our school, with a long-term goal of adapting perspectives of students and faculty to embrace environmental health in every aspect of their daily lives and careers. With the aid of Penn Sustainability group and our own facilities coordinators, I was able to install PennVet's first ever composting program in our buildings. The composting collection has now been running for several months and has been ultimately very successful. With the option to compost food waste at the school, students and faculty have significantly helped to decrease overall trash output. Additionally, this program has encouraged many students to invest in composting options at home and to re-think their buying choices with a focus on minimal waste. In addition to the composting program, the One Health Club improved our environmental component at this year's annual One Health Symposium. As the third tier of One Health, Environmental Health is often overlooked. We made it a mission this year to better incorporate this theme into our symposium with lunch and dinner talks focused on health professional's potential roles in improving environmental health. Simultaneously, I hosted a reusable container raffle throughout the week of our symposium to encourage limited waste initiatives. The raffle incentivized students who attended our symposium events to bring their own reusable container and utensils for eating the catered food. Students who attended the most events with their own containers were then eligible for monetary prizes as a reward. The response to this raffle event was overwhelming and students took the initiative far beyond the symposium events. Subsequently we have now seen many clubs on the PennVet campus employing these reusable container initiatives in their events. It has been extremely rewarding to see my peers excitedly come up to me daily to show me their Tupperware containers that they brought to a lunch or dinner talk. My hope is that events like these continue to exist and become the status quo on our campus in the future.

Veterinary Experiences Affecting Environmental Health

As a new intiative by SAVMA's Global and Public Health Outreach Officer, The Vet Gazette will be highlighting student research projects that involve the third, often forgotten arm of the One Health triad -- the environment!

The first to be featured is Bonni Beaupied from Colorado State University!

"This summer, with the support of CSU's Veterinary Summer Scholars Program, I worked with our Department of Environmental and Radiological Health Sciences on a budding One Health research project. The broad goal of this project is to evaluate the impact of air pollution on dairy cow health and to use that information to better understand the impact on human health in understudied populations. Exposure to air pollution, including criteria pollutants such as ozone (O3) and aerosolized fine particulate matter (PM2.5), has been associated with increased morbidity and mortality in mammals. These effects have primarily been studied in the laboratory or in humans living in urban settings. Situated in a controlled environment that facilitates data collection, dairy cattle present a unique, yet unexplored, opportunity to assess the correlation between subtle shifts in air pollution and mammalian health. Furthermore, ground-level O3 peaks during the hot summer months, when dairy production is lowest, and may therefore be an unexplored factor in reduced milk production. My research aimed to assess the effects of air pollutants on dairy cow health by comparing O3 and PM2.5 levels recorded by local US EPA air quality monitors to daily production data and bulk tank somatic cell counts. Initial results have supported the hypothesis that O3 exposure is associated with reduced dairy yield. The results of this study may uncover areas for intervention to improve these impacts at the dairy level. These data will also contribute to a translational model for using cattle health as a proxy for human health, particularly in rural settings or other regions with limited air quality data."

Congratulations, Bonnie!