It takes very strong One Health surveillance systems to be able to identify cases or events that may not happen all the time. Are there ways to monitor the potential for spillover? Whether it could happen sporadically remains to be seen. Could this illness spread to humans?Īt the moment, I have not seen any evidence for this. If you have a small group, and it's always the same dogs that are in that group, the risk may be lower than a dog in a kennel that has a lot of different dogs coming in and out. That means that the dogs at highest risk are those that travel a lot or that have a lot of contact with other dogs-at dog parks or boarding facilities, for example. Infectious disease transmission usually occurs through either direct or indirect contact. We would be able to understand how that known illness has developed over time. We'll know more as we get more results from research teams and veterinary diagnostic laboratories.Īs we start to dig into the diagnostics, I'm curious to see if this is indeed something emergent, or if what we're seeing is actually just better reporting and care seeking by owners, and what we’re witnessing now has actually been around for a while. Looking to see if that may be the case is a prudent thing to do, and that's what's happening. That being said, sometimes when you have a case definition, it's not all caused by the same thing, and it’s not necessarily an emergent or novel pathogen. There are a number of teams doing testing, and some of the early results suggest that there may be a bacterium involved, but it's not clear whether that’s the causative agent across the board. We're still in a very early stage, so I would not hazard a guess as to what it will end up being, or if it will even just be one thing. Do we know what's causing this? Is it a bacteria, a virus, or a fungus? Not only are some pets requiring additional treatment for a lingering cough, but some are needing hospitalization, or at risk of death.įortunately we are much better at recognizing it in our “pandemic plus” era-this period of time after the official pandemic has ended, when there’s still lots of disease in humans caused by SARS-CoV-2, as well as influenza and RSV. There’s cause for concern when we see that kind of speed and severity of disease in dogs. That may limit our ability to understand what’s going on. This means we don't necessarily know about all cases of an illness or have a strong system in place to do testing on every single animal. We have a lot of ability to treat and test lots of people, including those who may not have insurance, or who may come from diverse backgrounds.Įven though access to human health care can be limited in the U.S., it's not as limited as access to veterinary medicine-where you have to pay to go to a veterinarian. In the U.S., the CDC has systems in place through local and state health departments to monitor cases of human disease. We don't yet know, because we don't have a good surveillance system in place for animal health like we do for humans. because we’re heading into winter, when we generally see lots of respiratory cases increase, or is this something new? How many cases of sick dogs have there been? It’s going to take some time to have enough samples of these cases and do further testing to answer questions like: Is this something that’s been around for a long time? Are there a bunch of different things causing illness? And are we just seeing cases now in the U.S. A case definition could be built based on dogs that have these respiratory patterns-whether mild or more severe, but especially the most severe cases that progress to pneumonia and other outcomes-but test negative for those known pathogens. To do this, veterinarians collect samples from dogs presenting symptoms and send them to a lab to test them against known pathogens. To identify which cases may be specific to this unusual pattern, we try to establish a case definition and confirm that the dog isn’t sick with an illness we already know about. What’s raised concern is how quickly some dogs have become very sick. A cough can also be seen in many other fairly common illnesses that dogs get, like kennel cough. The symptom we’ve associated most with this disease is cough, but having a cough doesn't necessarily mean that a dog has this particular syndrome. We've had reports of mysterious illness in multiple states, but it appears to be a bit worse on the West Coast of the U.S.-a lot of the cases so far have been in Oregon. What do we know about this unidentified respiratory illness in dogs?Īs of right now, we don't quite know exactly what it is, if anything, but it's being called atypical canine respiratory disease.
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