Following up on a recent post regarding evidence for shortened duration of treatment in select cases of feline infectious peritonitis (FIP), we have a new WormsAndGermsPod quick-bite on FIP treatment duration.
This short 14-minute podcast covers:
We started WormsAndGermsBlog on a bit of a whim. I didn’t really know much about blogs but Maureen Anderson and I we were working on a project to develop infectious and zoonotic disease resources for different audiences, and realized that making physical flyers (or CDs… remember those?) wouldn’t be overly impactful or sustainable. Around that
When an unvaccinated person is exposed to rabies, they typically receive post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) consisting of a dose of anti-rabies antibodies and four (4) rabies vaccines over the course of two weeks. In dogs and cats, it’s a different story. We don’t use formal PEP protocols in pets in most regions.
Some dogs cross the border between the US and Canada because the closest veterinary clinic (or closest referral/specialty clinic) is in the other country. In the past, that hasn’t usually been an issue because of the ease of dog movement between Canada and the US. That’s going to change very soon due to new dog
The US has been tinkering (for the good) with their canine importation rules for the past few years, primarily in response to concerns about importing rabid dogs. The US had just announces a new set of rules for importing dogs, that come into effect August 1, 2024. The new rules aim to provide more assurance
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
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
Hot off the press (at long last), here is the latest version of the World Health Organization’s Medically Important Antimicrobial List.
What is the WHO Medically Important Antimicrobial List?
It’s a document that categorizes all the classes of antimicrobials that are used in people and/or animals by how important they are to human medicine
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
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
