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:
Next in the World AMR Awareness Week (WAAW) series is a recycled post about our cat Rumple from this past summer. It’s not just because I’m lazy. It’s largely because it’s a great topic and an issue for which there’s a lot of unnecessary antibiotic use (especially in cats).
Rumple’s an indoor-outdoor cat that
Back in August, I wrote about a high-profile but poorly described “outbreak” of feline infectious peritonitis (FIP) in cats in Cyprus. Now, a preprint publication (Attipa et al. 2023) has come out with some interesting information, but lots of questions still remain. That’s the nature of emerging diseases – a single report
A recent case report in the journal American Journal of Case Reports (Garza et al. 2023) implicated a pet cat as the cause of a person’s recurrent Clostridium (Clostridioides) difficile infection.
Spoiler alert: it’s a pretty weak link. They have a catchy title: “Look what the cat dragged in! Recurrent Clostridioides difficile
Vaccine hesitancy by pet owners has been in the news a lot recently, largely due to a recent study about the prevalence and consequences of vaccine hesitancy among dog owners in the US (Motta et al. 2023). The survey-based study reported 37% of respondents think vaccines can cause “cognitive issues, like canine/feline autism”
Avian flu caused an uptick in discussion about health risks associated with feeding dogs and cats raw meat, based on the possible (and still pretty tenuous) link between raw poultry and a large number of H5N1 infections in cats in Poland.
The link between raw diets and flu infections is new, and something
I’ve held off writing about this unusual outbreak of cat deaths on the island of Cyprus for a few reasons, a big one being a lack of clear information, but the situation has drawn a lot of attention.
In general, when we have reports of strange disease events, there are a few scenarios to consider:
My own animals provide frequent fodder for this blog, both good and bad. Rumple’s been featured a few times before, and his latest escapade is a great antimicrobial stewardship case.
Rumple’s an indoor-outdoor cat that we adopted years ago through Guelph Humane Society’s working cat program. He was deemed unsuitable for a household, so we
The H5N1 avian flu outbreak in cats in Poland seems to be slowing down but the cause is still under investigation. While outbreaks often die out on their own (sometimes because of what we do, sometimes despite what we do), it’s still important to figure out what happened, to help understand the disease and ideally
Information continues to trickle in about the situation with H5N1 avian influenza in cats in Poland. It’s mainly been updating the number of confirmed infected cats, with 16 cats in 3 cities being the latest number I’ve seen. It’s also now reported that some of the cats are primarily indoor (house) cats.
Numbers are part
