SPOKANE — Washington State University is testing animal diseases to stop the next human pandemic.
Just like COVID-19 may have originated in an animal before spreading to human beings across the globe, the Washington Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory is one of a handful of facilities in the United States trusted to test animal samples at the highest level of security.
Located on WSU’s campus in Pullman, WADDL opened in 1974 and debuted a new building in 2021. The facility performs over 300 different tests that identify diseases in more than 20,000 animal samples, conducting approximately 250,000 of them per year .
Traditionally, the facility has focused on how animal disease can impact America’s food supply. Without quick measures to quarantine or treat an animal, one sick chicken can kill a whole poultry facility’s worth of birds in a single weekend. In 2022, the introduction of highly pathogenic avian influenza, known as H5N1, killed over a million chickens at Oakdell Farms in Franklin County, Washington.
The initial sample from that poultry farm was tested at WADDL, and its detection kept the outbreak from spreading to other birds across the state. After WADDL completed its test at the Oakdell facility, it took federal laboratories another five days to get the same result.
“We contained it to a single facility. Unfortunately, within four days, a million birds were dead from that virus,” WADDL Executive Director Kevin Snekvik said during a tour of the facility this week. “There were a few hundred cases on Friday afternoon. By Monday morning, there were over 1.3 million. That is the intensity of the situation and why it’s so important to have timely testing.”
But a new focus of WADDL in the nearly five years since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out is how their animal testing can prevent diseasing transferring from animals to people. Like it did in coronavirus, such a disease transfer could catch our immune system unaware and cross the globe in its new human hosts.
“It’s humbling, because there is a lot of responsibility and expectation of doing things right,” Snekvik said. “I go home at night feeling like I’ve done something important, because it’s not just at the animal level. It is at the producer level helping the farms, helping their workers. It is helping the whole of the public.”
This summer, WADDL was awarded a $1.5 million CDC grant to identify and track respiratory diseases in the Pacific Northwest that have the potential to jump from animals to humans. The facility’s testing is especially focused on diseases found in animals such as cows, goats and sheep. These mammals are understudied compared to others that also have frequent contact with people.
“These are species that have the potential to spread diseases to humans,” project lead and WADDL virologist Thomas Waltzek said in June. “It’s all about detecting these diseases quickly, determining if the viruses have pandemic potential and immediately taking corrective actions to hopefully prevent a pandemic.”
Mammals are also more genetically similar than other kinds of mammals, which can also increase the risk of an animal-to-human disease transfer. That is why there was concern at WADDL when avian flu was recorded in cattle for the first time earlier this year.
The infected cows were first discovered in the Texas panhandle from a producer who sought testing after milk production went down. Facilities like WADDL could not figure out what was wrong with the cattle until they decided to test for H5N1, a disease normally found in birds. The United States has since seen an outbreak of avian flu in cattle, including in southern Idaho. That outbreak is ongoing, and now cows were diagnosed in California as recently as last week. So far there have been no cases in Washington.
The avian disease does not kill cows like it does birds. It just makes them sick and lowers milk production. But H5N1 in cows can spread to wild birds, which then can spread to poultry facilities and beyond.
There is also the “concerning” possibility the avian flu can jump from birds to cows to humans — something Snekvik said WADDL is taking seriously. But based on genetic sequencing conducted at WADDL, it does not appear that is likely.
The Pullman laboratory is paying attention to other diseases, too. WADDL recently diagnosed a rare case of plague in an Idaho deer. They are on the lookout for African swine fever, which is endemic to pigs in eastern Europe.
“If that virus gets into our wild boar population, we will never be able to get rid of it. And wild cases will keep coming in to kill in our production facilities,” Snekvik said.
WADDL also just diagnosed Washington’s first case of chronic wasting disease, a fatal brain sickness in deer. Since the detection in February, WADDL has increased its wasting disease testing. There is not currently a concern that the disease can be spread to humans.
Snekvik said those who hunt should not be “fearful” of consuming venison. But as a precaution, no hunter should eat meat from an animal that had been sick before its death.
With all these dangerous diseases coming in and out of WADDL, biosecurity is the laboratory’s top priority. Their new facility was constructed as a “box within a box,” Snekvik said. Within WADDL is a three-floor area that is entirely self-contained. Samples can move from lab to lab within that box without ever leaving containment.
Security is crucial, as for years many have theorized that coronavirus leaked out of a lab. While the idea is still contested by some scientists, a U.S. House Oversight Committee said in May said that documents “credibly” supported the theory.
“Samples are not traversing in and out of the containment box. If there’s something infectious in there, we don’t want it to get out to spread to other animals or other places. And with our precautions, we make sire to keep things in there,” he said.
