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
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”
(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
There’s nothing too earth-shattering here, but a few useful changes pertaining to rabies regulations are coming to Ontario as of July 1, 2023.
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
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
