Part of me thinks this is interesting and part of me wonders why it’s noteworthy. Let’s go with the first thought and consider the interesting aspects of a presentation at the recent ASM Microbe 2019 Conference, “79 cases of pet-associated Pasteurella multocida infections in a 30-month period with reports of novel modes of
Oddball infections or concerns?
Anytime you see a case report in the medical literature, you know it must be something rare or new. Otherwise, no one would publish the occurrence of a single case. That can skew people’s perceptions because weird things get more attention.
So, it’s always hard to say what we should think about one-off reports of
More Pasteurella in the news
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
A near fatal dog lick?
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).
Cats and peritoneal dialysis
If you’re a regular reader, you’ll note the recurring theme of "every animal (and person) is carrying multiple microbes that can harm you, given the right circumstances. Fortunately, the right circumstances don’t usually occur."
There are situations in which those risks increase, and understanding cost-benefit is a key aspect of disease prevention. Sometimes pet
Casual cat causality
The credit (or blame) for the alliteration goes to colleague and frequent blog material supplier Dr. Stephen Page. It relates to an article in the prestigious medical journal Lancet (Kagihara et al. 2014) entitled “A fatal pasteurella empyema.”
The article describes the case of a 60-year-old man from Honolulu who was
Cat bite infections (and dumb headlines)
It’s a scary sounding headline: “Cat Bites Pose Risk Of Infection As 1 In 3 Patients Bitten Hospitalized; Teeth Inject Bacteria Into Joints, Tissue” and it cites a research article from the Mayo Clinic in the Journal of Hand Surgery (Babovic et al 2014).
Cat bites are nasty. The mouth of
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
Dogs aren’t always the biters….
Dogs have had some bad PR lately because of some high-profile bites and bite infections in people. So, in the spirit of fairness, I’ll write about a dog as a victim of an attack… from a cat.
A paper in a recent edition of Veterinary Dermatology (Banovic et al 2013) describes necrotizing cellulitis
Cat tongue almost kills man
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