I’ve held off writing about this for a few reasons, a big one being a lack of clear information, but a lot of attention has been directed towards an apparent outbreak in cats on the island of Cyprus.
In general, when we have reports of strange disease events, there are a few scenarios to consider:
If we know one thing about influenza A, it’s that there will always be something new to pay attention to.
A recent study out of China describes what seems to be a new canine flu strain. Is it a concern? It’s hard to say at this point but having more flu strains in species that
A couple days ago, there was a ProMedMail request for information following a report of a large number of dead cats in Poland. The cats were reported to have had respiratory and neurological disease, so my thought process went to ‘that fits with avian flu spillover’, then ‘but that large of a number would be
Being asked to coordinate a paper for the Journal of Law and Medical Ethics wasn’t on my academic bingo card for the year but like a lot of things in recent years, I’ve come to expect the unexpected. The paper in question is part of a special edition entitled Addressing Antimicrobial Resistance through the Proposed
As a journal associate editor and reviewer, I’ve seen lots of papers about SARS-CoV-2 in animals. Some have been great, ground breaking papers. Many have been weak, small studies rushed out to be first, with inadequate depth and critical assessment. Some have been a complete disaster. The latter two groups are a concern beyond just
I’ve written (ranted?) about this before – namely the misuse of antimicrobials intended for treatment of aquarium fish in other species. Usually such posts are followed by a deluge of nasty emails along with a bunch of curious requests for links to fish antibiotic sellers (8% kickback available!).
Another sponsorship request came in this morning,
The first two parts of this series covered our approaches to vaccination of ‘healthy’ animals. We focus healthy pets since they comprise the majority of the pet population. Also, vaccines are typically labelled for use in healthy pets: “e.g. “This product is recommended for the vaccination of healthy dogs…”. It doesn’t say not to use
Things have been pretty quick regarding monkeypox in domestic animals lately. Whether that’s because human case numbers are dropping and human-animal infection is rare, or whether it’s because there’s not enough surveillance isn’t clear. I suspect it’s a combination of the two. Our surveillance has been really slow since it’s been hard to recruit participants,
At first glance, if you follow zoonotic diseases, you might look at the title of this post and think ‘what is he rehashing now? We know Salmonella is common in reptiles and contact with reptiles is a major risk factor for salmonellosis in people.”
In large part, you’d be right. Not a lot has changed
Now that human-dog transmission of monkeypox has been identified, there’s a lot more interest in what to do about animals that have been exposed to infected people. As more people get monkeypox, more animals will be exposed. We want to reduce the risk of the animals getting infected (and maybe infecting people), while at
