CAVIDS Titer Testing

Outreach

CAVIDS Laboratory partners with many organizations both within the School of Veterinary Medicine and around the country. We’d like to tell you about a few of them!

We continue to provide titer testing at low cost to animal shelters experiencing outbreaks of canine parvovirus, canine distempervirus, or feline panleukopenia virus.  This service is coordinated either with the shelter directly or through the UW-Madison School of Vet Med Shelter Medicine Program.  Having antibody titer information allows those animals who are protected from disease to be adopted to new homes, and susceptible animals to be quarantined and treated.  This is an immense improvement over the old method of depopulating the shelter entirely when faced with an outbreak of these diseases.

Over the years 2015-2018, our laboratory completed low cost titer testing for 2,670 sheltered dogs and cats across North America.  Many more shelters were served in the years prior to 2015 when our laboratory received support from Maddie’s Fund®.  We are very grateful to the Fund and to Maddie for their support in the past, which allowed us to help save many lives.

 

CAVIDS laboratory also offers titer testing service to WisCARES – a School of Veterinary Medicine program to help homeless and precariously housed people gain access to veterinary care for their animal companions and social support systems for the humans of their family.

https://www.avma.org/news/javmanews/pages/151201a.aspx

https://socwork.wisc.edu/wiscares-aid-dane-county%E2%80%99s-homeless-population

CAVIDS laboratory is happy to support Journey Together – a program here in Wisconsin in which dogs in training reside at the Oshkosh Correctional Institution. Inmates apply to become dog handlers.  Those accepted into the program volunteer their time to provide care and training of the dogs. Community volunteers also play key roles in the program. Some go into the prison to instruct training classes for the Inmates. Others take dogs on trips in public so that the dogs can gain the experience essential for them to be service dogs for individuals that have been diagnosed with PTSD.

https://journeytogetherservicedog.org/index.html

 

Assistance Dogs of the West is another program that is supported by the CAVIDS laboratory.  This organization raises and trains dogs for service work,  such as assistance for people with autism spectrum disorder, type 1 diabetes, or post traumatic stress disorder.

http://assistancedogsofthewest.org/