We've been ringing the alarms bells early and often in previous editions of this very newsletter about the rise in vector borne diseases. We’ve also spent much of the past year pointing our readers toward Dr. Erin Lashnits' fantastic vector borne disease CE.

And this month, the tick conversation went mainstream. Vox's Today, Explained devoted a full episode to what it called "our national tick nightmare," and the numbers behind the headline are the ones we've been citing all along. Lyme cases have more than doubled over the past decade, the Lone Star tick has gone from absent to established across a widening swath of the eastern US, and vector control funding remains overwhelmingly tilted toward mosquitoes even though ticks account for the large majority of vector borne disease cases in the country.

What's new since we last covered this territory in June is the (American) politics. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has spoken publicly about his own history with Lyme disease, has made it a signature issue: convening a roundtable with patients and researchers, and rolling out a plan built around tick control pilots, innovation challenge grants, and a clinical trials network for repurposed treatments. Conspicuously less discussed is an actual vaccine. Pfizer's Lyme candidate reported positive Phase 3 results earlier this year and is headed toward regulators, but the memory of LYMErix, the GSK vaccine pulled from the market 25 years ago after unsubstantiated arthritis concerns, still shadows the conversation.

None of that addresses a parallel finding closer to home. A new qualitative study in Nature, drawn from focus groups with UK dairy farmers and their vets, found that tick borne disease risk on farms is managed almost entirely by feel. Farmers and practitioners lean on landscape familiarity and trial and error rather than diagnostics, often can't tell whether a given field harbors infected ticks, and describe real emotional and financial strain from outbreaks they still can't reliably predict. It's a reminder that the diagnostic and communication gaps driving the human side of this conversation exist in food animal practice too, just with far less media attention. If our clients are finally paying attention to ticks, that's an opening to raise harder conversations about herd level risk as well.

A recent Royal Veterinary College study, published in PLOS One and covered by AAHA Trends, offers a clean explanation for a familiar frustration: clients who clearly know something is wrong with their pet but still wait too long to call.

Researchers presented 1,772 UK dog owners with 30 hypothetical scenarios drawn from real case histories, then compared their answers against the judgment of 14 experienced veterinarians.

The gaps clustered around conditions that look mild until they aren't:

One finding we should be mindful of: internet use wasn't associated with worse performance, and actually correlated slightly with better accuracy, but the type of resource mattered. Owners who used condition specific health communities assessed urgency more appropriately than those relying on general breed or sport forums. That's a nudge toward pointing clients to better sources rather than writing off "Dr. Google" wholesale. It also bears consideration of how this will change in the age of AI (more on that below).

The study's authors point to two practical levers: consistent messaging from whoever answers the phone, so triage advice doesn't vary by which team member picks up, and stronger habitual contact between clients and their own practice, since owners who routinely sought guidance from their vet assessed urgency more accurately across the board.

This week, OpenAI announced Health in ChatGPT, letting U.S. users connect Apple Health and medical records from some hospital systems, including One Medical, Function Health. This change allows ChatGPT to draw on that history across any conversation, not just inside some dedicated health tab.

The rationale is interesting. OpenAI found that more than 70% of health conversations were already happening outside their original walled-off health experience. People weren't going to the tool to talk about their health. Health questions were just showing up wherever they already were. Mid-conversation or in any chat.

This is exactly what's already happening in veterinary medicine, just without any of the scaffolding.

We know that pet parents have been dropping radiology reports and bloodwork panels into ChatGPT for a while now. Not because there's a "Pet Health" mode. Because the tool is sitting right there and the discharge summary sometimes reads like it was written for a colleague, not a client. OpenAI just spent a year building the infrastructure, consent model, and physician-validated benchmarks to make that behavior official and safer for humans. Nothing equivalent exists for animals. There's no "connect your dog's PIMS record," no Apple Health for a Labrador's activity and meds, no HealthBench for veterinary chatbot answers… yet.

OpenAI has stated that the tool "does not replace the judgment of qualified medical professionals" and can still get things wrong. However, this might act more as a CYA move than how people interact with it in reality.

The consent model has a few key granular concepts. There is a per-request permission and connected records are excluded from training and ad targeting, The history deletes in 30-days if you disconnect. This same consent does not exist for pets. The data they send is gone. Poof. No HIPAA, no PIPEDA, no related privacy for our furry companions.

I don’t think this means veterinary medicine needs to rush out a copy of Health in ChatGPT. But it may come down the line. The market is smaller but still meaningful when it comes to pet health. To me it does mean that the expectation around AI use is being set, by a product we don't control, aimed at an entirely different species. Pet parents will show up expecting longitudinal, connected, plain-language health conversations about their animals whether or not the infrastructure to support that safely actually exists yet.

Today and tomorrow’s pet parent is going to walk in more informed, occasionally overconfident, and still Dr. ChatGPT-ing what treatment options they should be offered.

-RBA

Here are some of the other stories that caught our eye and we're following this week from around the veterinary world and animal kingdom: