When we talk about “worms” in dogs or cats, we’re usually talking about parasites that can infect pets or (less commonly) that harbour other pathogens. However, there are also certain worms that can cause other problems for our furry friends. For example, the hammerhead flatworm (Bipalium adventitium) produces a very potent paralytic neurotoxin
Your Dog’s Social Network: A Research Study
Infectious diseases of dogs continue to be in the news, and that’s not going to stop. Anytime we have dogs mixing, we have some risk of disease transmission. I wrote about your dog’s social network and why it matters in a previous post.
We are now trying to gather some real data about typical dog
Acute Diarrhea in Dogs: What’s the Evidence For Different Treatments?
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?
It has nothing to do with severity of
US Healthy Dog Importation Act
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:
Candida auris in Dogs
Candida auris is an emerging infectious disease threat. This fungus causes disease almost exclusively in immunocompromised people, with infections most often acquired in hospital. While infections are rare, it’s a bit problem because mortality rates tend to be very high (20-60%), it can cause outbreaks in healthcare facilities, it can live on the skin
“Lifestyle Vaccines” in Dogs: Expanding Our Thoughts
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
Modified Live Kennel Cough (Bordetella) Vaccines in Dogs: What is the Human Risk?
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
New CLSI Breakpoints For Veterinary Medicine: How to Interpret Results While Labs Are Updating Their Protocols, Part 3: Pseudomonas
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
New CLSI Breakpoints For Veterinary Medicine: How to Interpret Results While Labs Are Updating Their Protocols, Part 2: Staph, Enterobacterales and Fluoroquinolones in Dogs
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
New CLSI Breakpoints For Veterinary Medicine: How to Interpret Results While Labs Are Updating Their Protocols, Part 1: Staph 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