Updated April 6: Revised guidance document

Ontario announced a shutdown of non-essential services yesterday.  Wisely, veterinary medicine was classified as essential. However, it’s not business as usual. Rather, it’s “best as we can” given other restrictions and social distancing that are absolutely necessary to curb the spread of COVID-19. There’s no clear way to

After my last very long post, here’s a quicky. Like most professions, veterinary medicine is being impacted by COVID-19 and the urgent need for social distancing. Many aspects of veterinary medicine are essential to public health, food safety and animal welfare, but we also can’t forget the importance of the human-animal bond, especially in

As the need for social distancing becomes abundantly clear, we need to figure out what that means. This isn’t a two-week venture anymore. A much longer period of social distancing will be required to help limit the damage from COVID-19. The challenge is maintaining some semblance of normal activities in the meantime.

Where does veterinary

One major trickle-down effect of widespread disease outbreaks can be a shortage of certain supplies. As COVID-19 has emerged and spread in humans, availability of items such as nose-and-mouth (e.g. surgical) masks rapidly decreased because of hoarding, diversion to the black market, increased unnecessary use and increased legitimate use. In such a situation, veterinary clinics

New antimicrobial resistance challenges continue to emerge. In the veterinary field (especially in small animals), we have the advantage of seeing what’s happening in human medicine first, since that’s often an early warning system for what we’re going to encounter. We’ve seen a variety of resistant bacteria first became a problem in people, and then

I’m lazy so I’ll use the blog to answer a question that I’m getting a few times a day.  Today’s question: how to disinfect a veterinary clinic if there is a concern about canine influenza?

The good news is that influenza viruses are pretty wimpy. They’re enveloped viruses, meaning they are covered by a

An article from NBCMontana.com describes a kennel cough outbreak in dogs in Bozeman, Montana. It’s a pretty basic article that outlines a rather typical presentation of kennel cough (now largely referred to as canine infectious respiratory disease complex – a respiratory infection that can be caused by a range of viruses, bacteria and Mycoplasma).