Ohio State spotlights surveillance, biosecurity work in VPM update

Ohio State’s Department of Veterinary Preventive Medicine is using its Summer 2026 newsletter to signal where it sees momentum in disease surveillance and preparedness: not only in research, but in outreach, training, and practice-facing education. The July 26, 2026 edition of VPM Voice highlights faculty and student achievements spanning swine and poultry biosecurity, tick-borne disease surveillance, foreign animal disease preparedness, and preventive medicine training. While framed as recognitions, the through-line is clear: the department is investing in surveillance capacity that reaches beyond the lab and into schools, communities, and production settings. (vet.osu.edu)

That fits with the department’s longer identity and Ohio State’s broader strategy. Ohio State says its Department of Veterinary Preventive Medicine, established in 1934, was the nation’s first program created to prevent and control globally important diseases of food animals and humans. More recently, the college has tied preventive medicine work to its Protect OHIO initiative, launched in fall 2025 to expand the veterinary workforce, strengthen public health, and improve agricultural disease preparedness. Protect OHIO specifically calls for stronger surveillance, better data-sharing, and improved response capabilities across agricultural sectors, against a backdrop of rural veterinary shortages and continuing concern over high-consequence animal diseases. (vet.osu.edu)

The most surveillance-specific item in the Summer 2026 newsletter is Risa Pesapane’s outreach and engagement seed grant. Her project, focused on a university-school partnership in Appalachian Ohio, aims to validate and integrate student-generated tick pathogen data into formal surveillance systems. According to Ohio State, the effort builds on a multiyear collaboration with the Appalachian Ohio Tick Project, where students participate in tick collection, DNA extraction, PCR pathogen detection, and data analysis. The plan is for Ohio State’s Buckeye Tick Test program, which Pesapane directs, to verify and analyze those findings so they can contribute to broader statewide surveillance. (vet.osu.edu)

That matters because Buckeye Tick Test is already evolving into more than a public-facing service line. Ohio State says the mail-in testing program, launched in 2025, processed nearly 6,000 ticks from 86 of Ohio’s 88 counties in its first year, giving researchers a detailed picture of tick activity and pathogen prevalence. Program materials also state that anonymized Ohio tick data are shared with collaborating health agencies, and that the testing platform is intended to support public health and veterinary surveillance. In other words, the Summer 2026 announcement points to a model in which outreach, diagnostics, and surveillance are increasingly blended. (impact.research.osu.edu)

The newsletter’s other highlights reinforce the same direction. Jacqueline Nolting’s recognition as a 2026 Community Engaged Scholar centers on The Swientist®, which Ohio State describes as a biosecurity education program that has grown from youth swine outreach into a nationally recognized, multi-species initiative serving swine producers, backyard poultry producers and exhibitors, equine producers, youth beef producers, and other communities. Andreia Arruda and colleagues were recognized for the PRUFA project, which delivers workshops on biosecurity and foreign animal disease preparedness, especially foot-and-mouth disease. Missy Matusicky’s teaching award likewise reflects a shift toward applied training, with fourth-year students working through herd health investigations and evidence-based problem-solving in field and shelter settings. (vet.osu.edu)

There’s also a notable research-to-practice thread in the trainee awards. Stefany Arevalo Mayorga received Ohio State’s Presidential Fellowship and AVEPM’s 2026 Mark Gearhart Memorial Graduate Student Award for work on the environmental prevalence of Salmonella Dublin in Midwest dairy-beef operations and its associations with biosecurity and farm management. Sara Sequeira was recognized for research on vehicle connectivity and biosecurity compliance in a Brazilian swine production system, a topic with obvious relevance to disease spread in intensive livestock networks. Together, those projects reflect the department’s emphasis on operational epidemiology, not just academic output. (vet.osu.edu)

Why it matters: For veterinary professionals, especially those in food animal, public health, and mixed practice, the bigger takeaway is that veterinary colleges are becoming more embedded in surveillance ecosystems. Ohio State’s approach suggests a practical model: combine producer and youth outreach, service-based diagnostics, student training, and formal epidemiologic analysis into a single preventive medicine pipeline. That can help close surveillance gaps in underserved regions, improve early situational awareness, and prepare future veterinarians to work across clinical care, outbreak response, and population health. It also reflects a wider industry need. Ohio State’s own Protect OHIO messaging explicitly links surveillance expansion with producer readiness and rural veterinary capacity, and college leaders have framed the next animal or human pandemic as a matter of when, not if. (vet.osu.edu)

What to watch: The next key test is whether these programs move from promising pilots and award-winning initiatives into sustained systems, particularly whether Buckeye Tick Test and the Appalachian Ohio Tick Project can generate validated data streams that public health and animal health agencies routinely use, and whether Ohio State’s preventive medicine training model becomes a template for other colleges facing the same surveillance and workforce pressures. (vet.osu.edu)