As awareness of canine infectious respiratory disease complex (CIRDC, formerly known as “kennel cough”) has spiked recently, there are more discussions happening about respiratory vaccines in dogs. A large number of different bacteria and viruses play a role in CIRDC. We can vaccinate against a few of them including parainfluenza virus (the most commonly
Modified Live Bordetella bronchiseptica Vaccines and High Risk Owners
A recent commentary in the Journal of Clinical Pharmacy and Therapeutics by Moore et al. entitled “A doggy tale: Risk of zoonotic infection with Bordetella bronchiseptica for cystic fibrosis (CF) patients from live licenced bacterial veterinary vaccines for cats and dogs” discusses concerns about using the most common “kennel cough” vaccines in animals
Modified-live pet vaccines and immunocompromised owners
Here’s a question I get a lot that I’ve posted about before:
I am immunocompromised, is it safe for me for my pet to get a modified live vaccine?
Or
A client came in and said their physician told them their pet should only receive killed vaccines.
Here is a little background first: Killed
Bordetella infection in a transplant recipient
It’s easy to write a series of posts about oddball infections. I often wonder whether it’s worth highlighting some of these rare disease reports since it’s possible for them to be taken out of context and unnecessarily freak people out. Yet, they often have a couple of useful messages.
A paper in an upcoming edition
Modified Live Vaccines: Pets and Immunocompromised Owners
Lately I’ve had a run on questions from veterinarians along the lines of “I have a client who is immunocompromised and their physician has said their pet should not receive a modified live vaccine. What should we do?”
There are a few different types of vaccines. Modified live vaccines are vaccines comprised of
Immunocompromised People and Their Pets
This month’s edition of the Internal Medicine Journal contains an article entitled High rates of potentially infectious exposures between immunocompromised patients and their companion animals: an unmet need for education (Gurry et al. 2017). The study is fairly superficial and there’s nothing particularly surprising in the paper, with results similar to what has
Do headline writers actually read the articles?
Part I Lyme disease is accompanied by enough paranoia. Bad headlines don’t help. A recent article on The Daily Mail is about Lyme disease and pets. It’s actually not a bad article, outlining some important issues. However, the headline shows a big disconnect between some good content in the article and a complete misunderstanding
Pets and peritoneal dialysis
I’m not a big fan of the title of a paper in the latest edition of the Canadian Journal of Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology…”Pets are ‘risky business’ for patients undergoing continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis” (Yahya et al 2013), even though it’s an interesting paper that actually takes a reasonable
New bugs, same story
A colleague recently let me know about an article in the journal Infection Ecology and Epidemiology entitled “Human wound infectious caused by Nesseria animaloris and Neisseria zoodegmatis, former CDC Group EF-4a and EF-4b" (Heydecke et al 2013).
These are new bugs to me…
The article outlines an effort to characterize these
Another dog-eats-toe story
It’s maybe a sad statement that reading about someone whose diseased toes were gnawed off by their dog doesn’t shock me anymore. It’s not an everyday event but it’s far from rare. An Indiana man learned about this the hard way when he woke up thinking his dog was licking his toes, when in fact