A few times a week, I get questions like this from veterinarians:

• I have a canine patient from [name your country] and it’s sick. What diseases should I be aware of?
• I have healthy canine patient that was just imported from [name your country]. What diseases should I be aware of?

Or I get questions like this from dog owners:

• I’m getting a dog from [name your country]. Are there any disease concerns I should know about?

Or, less commonly, I get questions like this from physicians:

• I have a sick (human) patient that adopted a dog recently from [name your country]. Are there any zoonotic diseases I should be thinking about?

We don’t have good international disease surveillance in dogs, or even a central database of the information that is available.  I’ve kicked around ideas to address this particular gap for a while, and Dr. Katie Clow and I have finally gotten something rolling as part of our broader canine importation research. Our goal is to make it easier for people to figure out some of the regional disease risks when importing or traveling with dogs, and to identifying zoonotic disease risks from dogs that have traveled or dogs encountered when traveling.

To do this we have created an interactive global canine infectious disease map. This is a VERY beta version, starting with a limited number of diseases, and there are almost certainly errors and omissions. The way we’re going to make this map most useful is with lots of ground-level input from different countries, especially those from where there’s little published information on infectious diseases of dogs.

We are soliciting input to identify any incorrect disease categorizations, relevant information that should be added to clarify infectious disease issues (if you hover over a country on the map, a comment box appears), and suggestions for the next diseases to add to the map.  Any comments can be sent to me at jsweese@uoguelph.ca, by Twitter @weese_scott or via the Worms & Germs Blog contact page.