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

While I get lots of interesting infectious disease questions every day, most aren’t new.

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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

We’ve been dealing with a major shortage of canine influenza vaccine for a while. That’s caused a few different hassles, some related to disease and others related to vaccination requirements.

A quick recap: There are a couple of different strains of dog-adpated flu internationally, but currently we’re really just worried about H3N2. This strain is

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.

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This is a big issue for human medicine, and was the focus of a lot of discussion at this

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

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,