I’ve held off writing about this but since I’ve been answering many emails about it every day, here we go.
The questions I keep getting (as usual) are “What’s going on with this reported outbreak of respiratory disease in dogs in the US? What new disease is this?”
I’m not sure there’s a
Continuing my World Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Awareness Week series, let’s talk about antimicrobial prophylaxis in animals.
If you asked random people on the street “Should antibiotics be given to healthy animals?” I’d expect the answer to be a resounding no. But, as with most things related to AMR, the answer is not as
This is a question I get a lot. My typical answer is “yes, but…”
The “but” can lead to a long discussion. I have a bit of a complex relationship with antimicrobial use (AMU) targets.
As we start World Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Awareness Week (WAAW) 2023, I’ll cover a variety of areas about this important topic.
Why do we even care about AMR?
AMR is an urgent international problem. It threatens the healthcare (human and animal) gains that we’ve made over the past century. It’s estimated that AMR was
A large and eagerly-awaited follow up study on adverse post-vaccination events in dogs was recently published recently, and it provides a lot of solid – but unsurprising – data.
The study (Moore et al. 2023), published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association and led by Dr. George Moore from Purdue
We’re getting reports of potential canine parvovirus infection in vaccinated dogs in some parts of northern Ontario. Parvo is a nasty but vaccine-preventable disease, and available vaccines are very effective. True vaccine breakthrough (i.e. infection in a fully vaccinated individual) seems to be rare with canine parvo, but no vaccine is 100% effective, so it
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”
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 had an interesting discussion yesterday about the “antimicrobial pipeline” as part of the Global Leaders Group on Antimicrobial Resistance. When we talk about the antimicrobial pipeline, we’re referring to the dwindling number of new antimicrobial drugs that are currently in development. Antimicrobial research and development (R&D) has fallen by the wayside over the
(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
