Tularemia is a nasty bacterial disease. The bug that causes it, Francisella tularensis, is a category A bioterrorism agent (along with things like anthrax, botulism, plague, smallpox and Ebola virus). It’s classified as that because it’s highly transmissible and causes serious disease, so it’s something you definitely don’t want.
The bacterium circulates in the
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
Every year or so, there’s a new wave of publicity/paranoia about the risks associated with dogs licking people. Often, it follows a study of bacteria that can be found in the mouths of dogs. It leads to a combination of balanced reports, sensational reports and defensive responses.
What is the concern?
Dog’s mouths are
The Canadian Journal of Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology has been good, recently, for a zoonotic disease article or two. The latest edition has a report of Pasteurella multocida infections of prosthetic joints (Lam et al. 2015). Pasteurella multocida is a bacterium that’s commonly found in the mouths of dogs and cats, and
I like to write about interesting papers that appear in the medical literature. A problem with that is that it’s often weird cases that get published. So, it’s important to keep things in perspective.
Regardless, reports of rare things still provide some insight, as long as people don’t over-react (which, unfortunately, is often the case).
Dr. Stephen Page, regular supplier of good material, sent me a couple papers from the Quarterly Journal of Medicine the other day. One’s an interesting report of ‘Staphylococcus intermedius’ infection in a person, in a case report entitled ‘A canine bug in a human heart’ (Koci et al, Q J Med 2015;108:337-338).
It’s
Some people like to send me links to internet sites to see if they can get a rise out of me. There are a few usual suspects (both senders of information and places I get sent to) but a new one for me was tlcpetfood.com
For some reason, this site has a series of FAQ’s
BMJ Case Reports has a recent paper entitled “Cirrhosis, cellulitis and cats: a ‘purrfect’ combination for life-threatening spontaneous bacterial peritonitis from Pasteurella multocida” (Hey et al 2012). (I don’t think we’d be able to use a title like that in a veterinary journal, but they often get away with titles playing
People sometimes get freaked out by the concept that they have approximately 10-times as many bacterial cells on them as all their own body cells combined.
Yet, we
While rabies is classically transmitted from animals to people by bites, any situation that allows saliva from an infected animal to get past the body’s protective skin barrier can result in infection. Graeme Anderson, a 29-year-old South African canoeist, recently died after contracting rabies from a sick dog for which he was caring. There
