While I get lots of interesting infectious disease questions every day, most aren’t new.
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
As per usual, the annual US rabies state-of-the-union has been published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (Ma et al. 2023). It’s the same general information every year, but always a good reminder of the ongoing challenges with rabies here in North America.
Here are some highlights from the animal-related
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
