I think it’s fair to say H5N1 becoming seemingly endemic in US dairy cattle in the past year caught us off guard. The virus has spread widely within and between US dairy herds, has caused mild infections in a number of people in close contact with infected cows, has killed a lot of cats on
Podcast: H5N1 Influenza and Raw Pet Food
The more H5N1 influenza continues to circulate in wild and domestic birds around the world, including here in North America, the more we have to be concerned about exposure of pets to H5N1 influenza through raw food diets. Recent documented infections in cats fed raw meat from infected birds have highlighted these concerns. For
Infographic: Canine Acute Diarrhea Treatment
Back in March 2024, I wrote a post about a systematic review of the efficacy of antibiotics and probiotics and the associated treatment guidelines for acute diarrhea in dogs from the European Network for Optimization of Veterinary Antimicrobial Treatment (ENOVAT). Now, we have an ENOVAT/WSAVA infographic to put all that into a
H5N1 Flu in Nevada Dairy Cattle: What’s the Concern?
- The cattle were infected with the D1.1 strain of H5N1, which has been
Update: Potential Cat-to-Human and Human-to-Cat H5N1 Flu Transmission?
Earlier today I wrote about a New York Times story about some interesting H5N1 flu transmission data from the US CDC that was posted briefly on Wednesday and was then quickly removed from the CDC website. The information suggested they’d identified cat-to-human and human-to-cat transmission of H5N1 flu in two separate households, both of
Cat-to-Human and Human-to-Cat H5N1 Flu Transmission in the US?
Cat-to-human or human-to-cat transmission of H5N1 influenza would be concerning but not too surprising.
Suppression of information by the US government would be concerning but not surprising given what’s going on at the moment.
But, did those occur?
The sharp eyes at the New York Times have raised concerns, because they spotted a CDC report
H5N1 Influenza in Another Cat: Oregon
Addendum: The Oregon Veterinary Medical Association has indicated in a release that the cat discussed below was euthanized because of the severity of disease. That’s more consistent with the severe disease that’s usually reported but I think the discussion below still applies since this seems to have been an initial primary respiratory disease presentation. It
PCR Testing for H5N1 Influenza in Cats and Dogs
- For cats and dogs, the recommended
US FDA Raw Pet Diet Directive
The FDA has issued a directive to pet food producers to ensure that their food safety plans address H5N1 influenza contamination issues. It’s in response to multiple cases of H5N1 avian influenza in domestic and wild cats fed contaminated raw diets containing poultry. Infection was fatal in many of these cats, and this also
Influenza Vaccination in Dogs: Cross Protection Against H5N1?
TLDR: Nope.
These days I commonly get the question ”Does vaccination of dogs with available canine influenza vaccines protect them from H5N1 avian flu?” While we don’t have any hard data on this, we still have a pretty good idea of the answer.
One of the challenges with flu vaccination (in any