December 2013

As we were heading into our 5th day without power as a result of a nasty ice storm, the power came back on. It’s been a pain, but with the generator, fireplace and family to visit in unaffected areas, it’s more disruptive than anything.

Not everyone’s that lucky.

If you don’t have a generator or

I write about Capnocytophaga canimorsus regularly… disproportionately so, since it’s a rare cause of disease in people. However, though rare, when disease does happen it’s usually serious, and cases illustrate some important basic concepts that apply more broadly to other zoonotic diseases from pets.

The title of this post is from the latest edition of

I just read a recent Medscape article entitled Human-Animal Interactions: a primer for clinicians. I assumed it would be one more relatively generic article about zoonoses, focusing on agriculture. Some of those aspects were there, but it had a lot more depth than I expected and went beyond the same old superficial talking points.

Here’s another one of my favourites from the archive (largely because it didn’t happen to me) that was worth re-posting (original post date 11-Oct-2009).

I was talking with a colleague the other day and somehow norovirus came up. He explained how once, his wife had viral gastroenteritis and ended up vomiting on their cat. Weirdly

Over the past few years, I’ve written a lot of posts on this blog. Hopefully the odd one’s been interesting and/or informative, and in the spirit of recycling (not laziness!) I’m going to re-post some that I thought were memorable or of particular interest.

The first one is actually the second post ever on this site

It’s flu season so I’ll take advantage of the time to talk about flu of a different type… canine flu.

Canine flu is different from seasonal flu in people. It’s caused by canine influenza A H3N8, and has spread around the US is a rather meandering and unpredictable manner. It’s caused major problems in dogs