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
Here’s a question I get surprisingly often.
I found a dead raccoon (or raccoon poop) in my pool and I’m freaking out about raccoon roundworms. What should I do?
The raccoon roundworm, Baylisascaris procyonis, is certainly a parasite of concern, but it’s also one that often leads to over-reaction and panic. While it can
I would have hoped that the issues with SARS-CoV-2 in mink would have been (yet another) wake up call, but I guess not. Some changes have been made in some areas, but it’s status quo in most places. Given our pretty crappy baseline
(TL:DR… check out the TikTok version at the bottom)
When I was a newly graduated veterinarian in general practice, I gave puppies and kittens their first rabies vaccine at 16 weeks of age. That was the standard at the clinic and a common practice elsewhere. Now, if I ask audiences of veterinarians when they vaccinated
There’s nothing too earth-shattering here, but a few useful changes pertaining to rabies regulations are coming to Ontario as of July 1, 2023.
I get a surprising number of emails from people concerned about Baylisascaris procyonis, the raccoon roundworm. Some are just a bit concerned while others are almost paralyzed by fear at the thought of this parasite lurking in the environment. Most of my responses are largely re-assuring people that the risk is very limited
While I get lots of interesting infectious disease questions every day, most aren’t new.
This one was.
To paraphrase, the question was basically “If we want to minimize the number of injections when vaccinating a dog, can we mix rabies and core (e.g. distemper, parvovirus, adenovirus) vaccines in the same syringe, using rabies vaccine
As per usual, the annual US rabies state-of-the-union has been published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (Ma et al. 2023). It’s the same general information every year, but always a good reminder of the ongoing challenges with rabies here in North America.
Here are some highlights from the animal-related
I doubt you’ll be shocked to hear that the normal host of Staphylococcus felis is cats. It’s a bacterium that can often be found in healthy cats and periodically causes disease in cats (e.g. urinary tract infections). Overall, though, it’s a pretty innocuous bug. Human health risks related to S. felis haven’t been well investigated
