No news is good news… at least hopefully. The past week was quite encouraging.
No new cases of canine influenza were identified in Ontario. A couple of “inconclusive” results were obtained from dogs in the Northumberland cluster that were previously positive. I approach these as essentially “weak positives,” because it means the test detected viral nucleic acids in the dog’s sample but at a low enough level that it’s not considered definitive. It’s not unusual to see inconclusive results after positive results, as viral shedding gradually decreases. Most often these dogs are negative the next time, although we have seen some go from inconclusive back to positive.
We haven’t seen any new positives in Muskoka for a couple of weeks, and at this point the infected dogs that we have been following are all known (i.e. negative test results) or likely to be negative (i.e. dogs that were positive a while ago but where we don’t have a final negative sample). So, it’s possible that there is no more flu activity in that area.
The fact that there were no new positives in Northumberland is encouraging, but we still have some positive dogs to watch there. We’ll continue to test in that area for a while to see if there is any other flu activity that we don’t yet know about.