A lot of infectious disease events get over-hyped by the media, which makes it a bit surprising that this case has flown a bit under the radar. It’s not a sign of an impending “influenza apocalypse,” but it’s a warning sign that more may be going on lately with flu viruses than we’ve been able
When mpox (formerly monkeypox) started to surge in Ontario back in 2022, I set up a study to try to look at possible human-to-pet transmission of the causative virus (known as MPXV), because we have very little information about the potential risks to pets, and their potential role in transmission. By the time we got
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment recently released information about 6 cats in the state diagnosed with H5N1 influenza. Some aspects of these cases are totally unsurprising, others raise a lot of questions.
Colorado has been hit hard by H5N1 in dairy cattle, with over 50 herds affected since the spring
I spend a lot of time talking to people about leptospirosis in dogs and the risks to people. From a zoonotic disease standpoint, I spend half my time trying to raise awareness of the potential for transmission of this bacterium from infected dogs to people. I spend the other half trying to talk people off
There’s a great new early-release paper in Emerging Infectious Diseases (Oguzie et al. 2024) about the emerging situation with H5N1 influenza in dairy cattle. It provides some important new information, and more details that somewhat challenge the early narrative.
The authors explain some of the limitations of the study to keep in
Adding to the “that was not on my bingo card” theme of the 2020s, there was a recent fatal H5N2 avian influenza infection in a person in Mexico.
First important point: this was H5N2, not the H5N1 strain we’ve been focused on for the past few years in bird (and spilling over into
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
I’ll take a break from writing about widespread canine infectious respiratory disease complex (CIRDC) in North America to talk about a single case of a rare disease in a dog. Wageningen Veterinary Research has reported a case of Bluetongue infection in a dog in the Netherlands, a disease of significant consequence to livestock that’s
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
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
