Diagnostic testing is a cornerstone of veterinary medicine that helps us optimize patient care, but there’s a lot of science behind it that people often forget. We collect a sample, send it off for testing and magically get the results, often without putting a lot of thought into what happens at the lab. Labs (should)
Let Doxycycline Off the Leash: No Need to Avoid It in Young Growing Animals
I spend a lot of time talking about antimicrobial misconceptions and dogmas. They are a big issue, because they often lead to unnecessary or excessive duration of antimicrobial use, use of more invasive routes of administration (e.g. intravenous over oral), or use of higher-tier antimicrobials than necessary.
I’ll just address one of these misconceptions today:
Antimicrobials Used For Growth Promotion: WOAH Call For Countries to Do What They Said They’d Do
The World Organization for Animal Health Health (WOAH, formerly the OIE) has issues a call to countries to live up to their commitments to phase out the use of antimicrobials for growth promotion in animals. This is low-hanging fruit in terms of antimicrobial stewardship that you’d think would have been addressed by now, but
US Antimicrobial Sales For Use in Animals, 2022
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s 2022 Summary Report on Antimicrobials Sold or Distributed for Use in Food Producing Animals has been released. It includes some good signs and some bad signs in terms of curbing antimicrobial use (AMU) in the US, but it’s clear we still have a lot of room to improve.
Mystery Dog Respiratory Disease (Or Not) and Antibiotics (Or Not)
As concerns about canine infectious respiratory disease in the US have taken up most of my time lately, let’s merge that issue with what I had hoped to be the focus of the week: World Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Awareness Week.
Despite lots of media attention and associated fear, we’re still not sure what’s going
Cat Bite Abscess: Rumple’s Story (Rerun)
Next in the World AMR Awareness Week (WAAW) series is a recycled post about our cat Rumple from this past summer. It’s not just because I’m lazy. It’s largely because it’s a great topic and an issue for which there’s a lot of unnecessary antibiotic use (especially in cats).
Rumple’s an indoor-outdoor cat that
Antimicrobial Prophylaxis in Animals
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
Veterinary Antibiotic Use Targets: Do We Need Them?
- Targets can be useful for driving change, to ultimately help us combat antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
- Targets can also be
WAAW 2023: Why Should We Care About Antimicrobial Resistance?
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
Do All Dogs With Diarrhea Need Antibiotics? (Spoiler Alert… Hell No!)
Dog gets diarrhea, then dog gets metronidazole (or another antimicrobial).
That’s a pretty rote approach to diarrhea in many areas, and one we’ve been battling for years, because there’s no evidence that antibiotics help dogs in these cases (and increasing evidence that they might even hurt).
Trying to get veterinarians NOT to prescribe antimicrobials in