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
Latest from Worms & Germs Blog
The dog didn’t do it: SARS-CoV-2 transmission NOT from dog to human
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
Fish Antibiotic Diversion
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,
Pet Vaccination Questions, Part 3: vaccinating ‘unhealthy’ animals
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
Monkeypox guidance for vets
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,
Salmonella in reptiles
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
What to do with monkeypox exposed pets?
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
Human-to-dog monkeypox, France
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.
Presumed transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from a cat to a vet
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
SARS-CoV-2 in cattle….take a deep breath and relax
Headline writers are probably going to screw up my day tomorrow by sensationalizing this, but a new paper in Animals (Fiorito et al) describes SARS-CoV-2 infection in cattle in Italy. (It’s an MDPI journal so I take anything published there with a big grain of salt given their low standards, but this one seems ok).