Lots of things you can get at a convenience store aren’t great for your health, but I wouldn’t have thought we’d have to add rabies to the list of concerns.
Public health officials in Niagara Falls, NY, are trying to track down nine baby raccoons that were handed out by someone outside a 7-Eleven store
A recent report from the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative (CWHC) describes an outbreak of tularemia in muskrats in Long Point, Ontario. Tularemia is a potentially nasty disease caused by the bacterium Francisella tularensis. While not many people have contact with muskrats or live in Long Point, it’s still noteworthy.
The investigation was initiated following
While COVID-19 is almost exclusively a human disease, it’s clear there can be spillover into animals. That’s probably of greatest concern in pets, because of the amount of contact we have with them and the susceptibility of some pet species (especially cats and ferrets). However, while we have less contact with other types of animals,
While the whole story hasn’t been sorted out, it seems pretty clear that one or more animal species at the Wuhan Seafood Market (which sold much more than just aquatic animals and their products) was the source of the novel coronavirus. Just like SARS.
Once again, this has raised concerns about markets where diverse live
As an Associate Editor for CDC’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal, I get an early look at some interesting articles (and have to read things that I wouldn’t necessarily get around to otherwise). The December edition just came out, and it had a variety of interesting articles. I’ll try to get to a few over the
I’ll hold back and just classify this as “not a great idea.”
How do that many people get exposed to a single raccoon?
Step 1: Take a wild raccoon and try to make it
Nothing has changed about Echinococcus multilocularis (the fox tapeworm) in the past couple of months, but my phone is ringing off the hook following another round of media reports about this parasite. Here’s a recap of the issues:
And now for something completely different.
We’ve studied Clostridium difficile in my lab for years and we probably have one of the world’s most diverse collections of this important bacterium. We have thousands of isolates from people, pets, livestock and many different wildlife species (as well as from meat, vegetables and water). Most of the
I’m taking a Brucella break to post a few interesting rabies stories.
A rabies warning was issued to residents of Taloyoak, Nunavut in response to identification of rabies in “a number” of dogs and foxes (I’m not sure what that number is).
This isn’t really new, as Arctic fox rabies is
I did a talk recently for Third Age Learning in Guelph, and there was an abundance of questions. I didn’t get through them all at the time, so I figured I’d address some of them here:
Do mice carry rabies?
Mice aren’t rabies reservoirs like raccoons, skunks or bats, as they don’t have a
