Being asked to coordinate a paper for the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics wasn’t on my academic bingo card for the year, but like a lot of things in recent years, I’ve come to expect the unexpected. The paper in question is part of a special edition entitled Addressing Antimicrobial Resistance through the Proposed
Do We Need “Animal Only” Antibiotics?
The antibiotic development pipeline is drying up. More companies are abandoning the area because antibiotics are expensive to develop and license, but they are low profit drugs that we try to use as little as possible.
This is a big issue for human medicine, and was the focus of a lot of discussion at this
Need 2 Know: Rabies in Pets video
Canada has a long-standing requirement for rabies vaccination of most categories of dogs and cats being imported from countries not considered free of non-bat rabies. While this requirement helps protect dogs and cats from rabies infection should they be exposed to endemic wildlife rabies that is present in Canada, it does little to prevent rabies
Why Is the Approach to Rabies Titres in Humans Different Than in Pets?
We have different approaches to rabies in dogs and cats versus humans. The ultimate goal is still the same: preventing this almost invariably fatal infection. However, between humans and animals there are differences in who we target for vaccination, frequency of vaccination, utility of rabies antibody titres, and how we respond to potential rabies exposures,
US Canine Influenza Outbreaks and Vaccination Decisions
As canine flu causes another (and particularly impressive) round of outbreaks in the US, a lot of questions arise. A big one involves vaccination.
I won’t go over the whole “what is canine flu?” spiel in this post, but I’ll give a quick overview of why we care about it. It’s a highly
Raccoons, Distemper and Dogs
Dead raccoons have gotten a lot of attention in Toronto lately, for various reasons. Many urban areas have abundant raccoon populations, and whenever there are a lot of animals (especially of the same species) living in a relatively small area, there’s greater risk for disease outbreaks. A distemper outbreak is playing a role (maybe
Pet Vaccination Questions, Part 5: Titres
Titres… ugh. I spend a lot of time answering questions about titres, with little data to go on.
What are titres?
Titres are a measure of antibody levels in the bloodstream. Antibodies are produced by the body in response to infection or vaccination.
What do titres tell us?
Titres indicate whether a specific antibody is
Pet Vaccination Questions, Part 4: Vaccination at the Time of Surgery
A busy hockey weekend delayed this topic. I thought this would be a quick one, but there are some interesting and complex issues…and as we move deeper into the vaccination series, there’s even less information on which to base decisions.
This post deals with issues surrounding vaccination at or near the time of surgery. Typically,
Pet Vaccination Questions, Part 3: Vaccinating “Unhealthy” Animals
The first two parts of this series covered our approaches to vaccination of “healthy” animals. We focus on healthy pets because they comprise the majority of the pet population, and because vaccines are typically labelled for use in healthy pets, e.g. “This product is recommended for the vaccination of healthy dogs…”.
Vaccine labels
Pet Vaccination Questions, Part 2: The Puppy/Kitten Vaccine “Series” (and putting it into an Ozzie context)
I’ll start this off with an introduction to Ozzie, our new-ish pup (he got introduced on Twitter earlier but I haven’t used him for blog material yet). We got him at 7 weeks of age, a day after he was vaccinated, and we need a vaccination plan going forward. It’s ultimately pretty simple, but it’s