“Doing nothing often leads to the very best of something.” ~Winne the Pooh
I don’t think the beloved wise sage of a bear was thinking about urine when he said that, but we can nonetheless heed the guidance of Winnie the Pooh when it comes to the management of subclinical bacteriuria. Here’s why:
Subclinical bacteriuria
I’m on the way home from ESCMID Global, a clinical microbiology and infectious disease conference. Although the conference didn’t include much veterinary-specific content, it did include a good collection of abstracts about zoonotic diseases, including a couple about diseases in veterinarians, one of which described an infection with Brucella canis.
I’ve written about
As the weather (slowly and inconsistently) gets nicer here in Ontario, dogs start to go swimming more. My dog, Ozzie (pictured below), is an embarrassment to the Labrador breed as he will not swim, but he’ll happily wade through water, as long as his feet don’t leave the ground (but he still manages to get
I haven’t written about raw diets lately (beyond risks from H5N1 influenza, particularly in cats), but that doesn’t mean the risks from these diets have gone away, and they are still really popular in some areas, and some messages are worth repeating.
Potential problems with raw diets for dogs and cats include infections (e.g. Salmonella
Many countries have import requirements for dogs based on rabies control (among other things), primarily based on the dog’s rabies vaccination history, plus or minus rabies antibody titre (RAT) testing. A few years ago (with support from the Ontario Animal Health Network), we studied RATs in dogs imported into Ontario by rescues (Belanger
A lot of interesting case reports get published in human medical and veterinary journals, but I always take case reports with a grain of salt. It’s not that I don’t trust the validity of the report, but there are those who may over-react to a single case. A publication about a single case typically signifies
Boehringer Ingelheim (BI) has issued a voluntary recall of one lot (serial #18665) of its IMRAB 3 TF rabies vaccine that was distributed in the US, because some vials in the lot were found to contain sterile water instead of vaccination. That’s a big oops, but it’s also good to see that it was
I periodically get calls from concerned veterinarians (none recently from Ontario, thankfully) along the lines of “We did surgery on a dog with a liver mass that was diagnosed as Echinococcus multilocularis (EM). What is the risk to the staff and what do we do to decontaminate the clinic?”
Depending on how well
We call rabies “almost invariably fatal” in people. Rabies kills an estimated 50,000 people a year globally, mostly in Africa and Asia. Even with very intensive care, the prognosis is grave. Only a very small number of people have survived rabies: there are approximately 34 documented cases of survival, but an even smaller number
When I was in general practice, we gave puppies and kittens their first rabies vaccine at 16 weeks of age. I didn’t ask why, it’s just what the clinic did, so as a new grad, that’s what I did. This practice is (unfortunately) still common in a lot of clinics; however, all rabies vaccines approved
