Worms & Germs Blog

Promoting Safe Pet Ownership

Latest from Worms & Germs Blog

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,

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

I’ll start this off with “don’t freak out, overhype it or be paranoid about your dog”.  (I’ll probably end with that too).
A recent report in Lancet (Seang et al) describes a pretty solid case of suspected monkeypox virus (MPXV) transmission from people to their dog. Two people development moxkeypox and they owned a dog.

I’ve done countless presentations and interviews about COVID and animals, and the question of whether pets can infect people always comes up.
My general line has been “We know that human-pet infection is pretty common. My main concern is cats, since we know they can spread it cat-to-cat. If they can do that, it’s logical