In some ways, I wonder why there even are recalls for raw pet foods and Salmonella. We know contamination is common, and the contaminated foods that get identified and recalled are presumably a very small portion of the amount of contaminated food that’s in circulation. At the same time, when a problem is identified
A recent recall of a raw pet food diets in the US due to contamination with Listeria monocytogenes has sparked some concern about the risks to people (and pets) that might have been exposed to these products.
In some ways, the big concerns raised by the recall are misplaced, not because it’s not an issue
I’m supposed to be in Rome for an antimicrobial resistance (AMR) meeting but a positive COVID test but a kink in my travel plans. So, I’ll take some unexpected time to catch up on some blog material. We’ll start with a pair of pet-food-linked Salmonella outbreaks, starting with a Canadian outbreak.
Avian flu caused an uptick in discussion about health risks associated with feeding dogs and cats raw meat, based on the possible (and still pretty tenuous) link between raw poultry and a large number of H5N1 infections in cats in Poland.
The link between raw diets and flu infections is new, and something
The H5N1 avian flu outbreak in cats in Poland seems to be slowing down but the cause is still under investigation. While outbreaks often die out on their own (sometimes because of what we do, sometimes despite what we do), it’s still important to figure out what happened, to help understand the disease and ideally
People can get pretty fired up when I talk about raw diets for pets. I’ll start off with my personal bias: I’d rather not see pets fed raw meat and raw animal-based products (e.g. pig ears and various bits-o-cow you can find in pet stores). There are clear risks to pets and owners from raw
I’ve written a lot about raw pet food in the past. Initially, the concerns were about Salmonella, since raw-fed dogs and cats have high rates of shedding Salmonella, and both pets and owners can get sick from it (owners can be infected directly by the pet or from handling or cross-contamination from the pet
I got a question about an old post on this topic, so I decided to add a bit of information and re-post it. Not much has changed since it was written in 2018, apart from more reports of people and pets getting sick from raw pet food and raw treats.
The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) has announced an outbreak of E. coli O157 infections in people linked to Carnivora brand raw pet food, and Health Canada has issued a recall of a number of Carnivora products due to potential contamination with E. coli O157. Illnesses have been reported in four individuals in
A recent study looked at human illness associated with raw pet food and has led to headlines such as “It is safe to feed raw pet foods.”
Did the study say that? No, it did not.
If you asked 100 people if they had a foodborne disease in the past year, I assume
