Trupanion partners with pet and public health authorities
Trupanion, in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and “leading” pet industry partners, announced the formation of a collaborative Advisory Board to launch a Pet & Public Health Early Warning & Detection System. The Advisory Board will also be joined by Boehringer Ingelheim, Mars Science & Diagnostics, and other leading pet, public health and animal health authorities.
The Early Warning & Detection System will be centered around Trupanion’s patented Veterinary Portal technology, which is already active in over 10,000 veterinary hospitals in North America and expanding globally. While purposely built as a tool to pay veterinary hospitals directly for Trupanion-insured members in real-time, there is a “significant and immediate public health benefit that previously had not been leveraged.” This technology will serve as a link to finding and analyzing signs of illness and health patterns in dogs and cats across breed, age, geography and more.
By making this data available to the Pet & Public Health Early Warning Advisory Board, Trupanion aims to help address the gap, enabling early detection and response to potential threats to pets and public health, ensuring a comprehensive approach to safeguarding the well-being of pets, their families, and the global community.
“The veterinary profession serves as a first line of defense for protecting both pets and public health. Empowering those entrusted with the care of our family pets is vital. Using real-time illness data, the Early Warning & Detection System concept could one day help to rapidly detect patterns and signs of illness in dogs and cats anywhere, any breed, any age, any sex, any time. For example, if young, female Poodles are coughing in Southern California, we could know in real-time and take quick action to determine any risks to pet health or public health. Early detection has global public health benefits. It could slow the spread of disease, speed treatment or alert to a brewing epidemic or pandemic. It could one day even help alert us to viruses such as those typically only identified in production animals if they jump to our household companions.” – Dr. Steve Weinrauch, BVMS, MRCVS, Trupanion’s Chief Veterinary & Product Officer.
