Acute diarrhea is pretty common in dogs. It’s pretty common in people too, but our approach in dogs versus people is VERY different:

  • Diarrheic dogs often get taken to a veterinarian ASAP.
  • People with acute diarrhea rarely go to a physician.

Why is the approach so different?

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It has nothing to do with severity of

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A new bill, the Healthy Dog Importation Act, has been proposed in the US Congress to deal with a few important issues related to dog importation. 

The proposed act would require any dog being imported to:

  • Have a health certificate from a licensed veterinarian “accredited by a competent veterinary
  • When we talk about vaccines of dogs*, we tend to split them into “core” and “non-core” vaccines.

    (*The same applies to cats. I use dogs by default for posts like this, which sometimes gets me an earful, but I’m not actually ignoring cats.)

    Core vaccines are those that every animal should

    As awareness of canine infectious respiratory disease complex (CIRDC, formerly known as “kennel cough”) has spiked recently, there are more discussions happening about respiratory vaccines in dogs. A large number of different bacteria and viruses play a role in CIRDC. We can vaccinate against a few of them including parainfluenza virus (the most commonly

    In the first two parts of this series, I explained a lot of the changes that have been made to the CLSI veterinary antimicrobial susceptibility testing guidelines, specifically those related to staphylococci and Enterobacterales (which includes E. coli and friends).  There’s less to say about Pseudomonas, but these changes will impact our

    The Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) has updated their main veterinary testing standards document: VET01SEd7E Performance Standards for Antimicrobial Disk and Dilution Susceptibility Tests for Bacteria Isolated From Animals, 7th Edition. Check out earlier posts for an overview of the relevant changes, and more specifics about the standards for staphylococci and chloramphenicol

    Yesterday, I wrote a post about a new version of CLSI’s Performance Standards for Antimicrobial Disk and Dilution Susceptibility Tests for Bacteria Isolated From Animals. There are some major changes in this update, and I sympathize with the diagnostic labs that now have to update their testing and reporting. It won’t happen overnight, because

    Diagnostic testing is a cornerstone of veterinary medicine that helps us optimize patient care, but there’s a lot of science behind it that people often forget. We collect a sample, send it off for testing and magically get the results, often without putting a lot of thought into what happens at the lab. Labs (should)

    I spend a lot of time talking about antimicrobial misconceptions and dogmas. They are a big issue, because they often lead to unnecessary or excessive duration of antimicrobial use, use of more invasive routes of administration (e.g. intravenous over oral), or use of higher-tier antimicrobials than necessary.

    I’ll just address one of these misconceptions today: