Animal Welfare Professionals

Response from discussion thread, "Community Conversations - 12/15/2025 - New Insights in Parvo Care"

A few key points and parameters that we use to fill this out:

1. Dogs are added to the spreadsheet after reviewing their locations on our software system (ShelterBuddy) and connecting with other departments. Tracing their movement and which dogs they've been in contact with can take some time. Once you've done a few it'll get easier!
2. The "date diagnosed" is typically the date that we notice clinical signs (and we are pretty proactive about SNAP testing clinical dogs - the risk of transmission is high in our shelter since we have so many dogs).
3. The RA considers the pre-clinical shedding period to be 3 days. You can edit this based on your shelter's level of and comfort with risk.
4. The "RA Results" auto-calculates dogs to be "Low-Risk" if they were vaccinated at least 5 days before exposure (allowing 5 days to develop immunity). You can edit this too. Dogs that were vaccinated less than 5 days before exposure are considered "High-Risk."
5. If an animal has any indication of vaccine history (spayed/neutered, microchipped, vaccine hx) we manually mark them as "Low Risk". 
6. The "RA Validated" field indicates that each individual animal's level of risk has been reviewed and the RA autocalculations checked. I usually review their records in more detail, and determine whether or not there is a meaningful level of exposure. 
7. The "BRC" is one of our receiving facilities that tends to have a higher risk of parvo, so you can disregard that :) 
8. We use this same RA template to manage our panleukopenia responses. 
9. This document is shared to all relevant shelter departments - especially helpful for our placement teams so they can keep working on moving low-risk dogs out. Also, moving high-risk animals into quarantine off-site (with adopters, rescues, foster) whenever possible.

Let me now if you have questions or need me to go over the nuances - it can be a little confusing! Feel free to develop it and make it your own.

Also, this ASPCA Pro parvo flow chart is pretty handy too and helps with the big picture response.