Hot on the heels of a recent update to dog importation rules in the US, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) has announced new rules for importation of commercial dogs into Canada.
The essence of the change is quite straightforward: “As of September 28, 2022, World Rabies Day, commercial dogs from
Dog importation rules in the US and Canada have changed a few times in recent years, in large part due to overdue recognition of some important long-standing issues, like the risk of importing rabid dogs. In the last several years, the US CDC has been implementing stricter rules around canine importation, culminating last summer
Addendum: OMAFRA has now issued their notification, along with advisories for vets and rabbit owners.
Rabbit hemorrhagic disease has been identified in a group of pet rabbits in Lambton County, Ontario. This is a bit of a “surprising, but not surprising” scenario, as this highly contagious virus of rabbits is already present
I’ve done countless presentations and interviews about COVID-19 and animals, and the question of whether pets can infect people always comes up.
My general line has been “We know that human-to-pet infection with SARS-CoV-2 is pretty common. My main concern is cats, since we know they can spread the virus cat-to-cat. If they can
Headline writers are probably going to screw up my day tomorrow by sensationalizing this, but a new paper in the journal Animals (Fiorito et al. 2022) describes SARS-CoV-2 infection in cattle in Italy. (It’s an MDPI journal, and I take anything published there with a big grain of salt given their low standards, but this
I very commonly get emails from vets like this:
My client was diagnosed with [insert various diseases here] and their physician said they probably got it from their [insert various pets here] and as a result they want the animal [tested / treated / rehomed].
While we’ve learned a lot about the susceptibility of many different animal species to SARS-CoV-2, horses have been a bit of an unknown. We’ve had concerns about potential susceptibility based on the nature of the receptor the virus uses to enter host cells, but study in horses has still been limited. A lot of that
As the current international monkeypox outbreak in people continues, more consideration is being given to the potential impact on, and subsequently from, animals. Animals are the reservoirs for this virus, although there are lots of gaps in our knowledge of the species monkeypox virus can infect.
The current cases outside of Africa are being spread
Local transmission of monkeypox wasn’t on my 2022 bingo card, but I guess we’re learning to expect the unexpected. I commonly talk about monkeypox when discussing zoonotic diseases, especially those associated with importation of animals, as this was highlighted by an outbreak of monkeypox in the US associated with imported rodents from Africa in 2003
As the unprecedented outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza continues in North America, there are numerous concerns about where the outbreak is heading and threats to other species, including domestic and wild mammals, and people (the latter being just another “domestic mammal”). My inbox is filled with questions about different concerns and scenarios. The one I’ll
