Dunn County health director warns of salmonella outbreak, maps service priorities and funding gaps

Katie Gallagher, Dunn County Health Department Director, told the board the department is monitoring a Salmonella Saint Paul outbreak and urged the public to avoid close contact with pet-store animals without proper hygiene: "we do have another outbreak associated with Salmonella Saint Paul," she said, adding a wry reminder from her annual packet: "do not kiss the chickens." Gallagher also noted a separate food-safety concern involving a tonic that raised botulism testing by state partners.

Gallagher highlighted outreach and preventive programs: WIC participation lags despite about 40% of children under 5 being eligible; the county's water-testing laboratory (funded by ARPA) will support more timely local testing than sending samples to Madison; and the department partnered with Planning and Zoning on a QR-driven "Golden Ticket" campaign to encourage annual well testing. She praised a mental-health and wellness event at the Mabel Tainter that drew more than 200 attendees and said the community is leveraging local foundation dollars for stigma-reduction work.

On strategy and partnerships, she described a Blue Zones readiness assessment covering a five-city region and said about 340 responses were already recorded; the nonprofit True Wellness (seeded by local business leadership) is funding initial assessment work and may support implementation in Menomonie based on readiness. Gallagher cautioned supervisors that the health department's mandated services (communicable-disease control, maternal-child health, public-health emergency preparedness) are underfunded and that some discretionary programs (for example, water lab and playgroups) were supported by grants or ARPA funds. She asked for help identifying which discretionary programs the board would prioritize if funding were reduced.

Gallagher and Paula Winter also walked through an operational-planning spreadsheet that organizes programs by division and by "basic/better/best" service levels, and they discussed how some nonmandated prevention activities produce long-term savings (for example, birth-to-3 playgroups and crisis services that help keep children in-home). Supervisors requested clearer bottom-line figures, projections and program-specific revenue breakdowns for future budget conversations.