The Canine Respiratory Infection Dominating Headlines

Hello 👋 

Welcome back to another edition of Weekend Rounds.

And a very happy Thanksgiving to our American friends, or to anyone whose who choose to take a few days off to see family, eat well, and watch sports. We like the cut of your jib.

Here’s what we’re covering today:

😷 A new(?) canine respiratory infection
🤔 A terrible take from Adrian Chiles
🦃 PETA’s Thanksgiving Turkey
🚀 Quick hits

😷 The Canine Respiratory Infection Dominating Headlines

A new canine respiratory infection dominated headlines this week as The Huffington Post, LA Times, NY Times, Time Magazine and more weighed in on the coverage.

What do we know?

While the story broke through to mainstream media this week - it should be noted that it’s not entirely new. In the spring of this year, the New Hampshire Veterinary Diagnostic Lab published a report sharing on a potentially novel respiratory disease in dogs.

So then what’s going on?

As Scott Weese discussed in recent Worms and Germs blog posts the presence of this new bacteria, which is similar to mycoplasma, but doesn’t necessarily mean anything at this point. The agent could be a commensal organism and more needs to be done to confirm the existence of the organism (like growing the bug in a lab setting).

Dr. Weese has written 3 posts on the ‘new’ illness now and the crux of it from his perspective seems to be:

• This is likely an increase in the baseline of Canine Infectious Respiratory Disease Complex (the artist formerly known as kennel cough) with increased Media attention [Link]

• The decision of whether or not to treat with antibiotics should follow the severity of the condition as the FirstLine App recommends [Link]

• We don’t definitively know if there is any new agent here [Link]

🤔 What is going on with Adrian Chiles?

Last week, Adrian Chiles - the British TV and radio presenter who currently works for BBC Radio 5 Live - wrote an opinion piece for The Guardian titled ‘What have I learned after three years of dog ownership? Beware of the vet bills.' We could not think of a better headline to trigger veterinarians if we tried. Really? That’s what you’ve learned?

Anyways… Mr. Chiles goes on to lament the supposed up-selling he has experienced at the vet calling it “MBA-level marketing zealotry”, the fact that all vet clinics seem to be part of a large corporation (“Is there an independent vet left in the UK?”) and how he has spent 4 figures on his dog over three years (“Yes, insurance would have covered most of these treatments, but that’s no comfort.”)

We won’t lie, it made our blood boil a little bit to see this kind of article get a platform as large as The Guardian. And if it absolutely needed to be published, it should have been called ‘Rich famous person learns that medical treatment is expensive, subsequently learns about insurance’

But kudos to The Guardian who also made space for Dr. Kate Platt, DVM to respond. It was a short article, but well written and succinct. But she absolutely hit the nail on the head for most of us:

You tell ‘em Kate!

🦃 PETA vs. Community Notes

On Thursday, PETA tried to come at turkey-loving Thanksgiving dinners on Twitter. Which is fine, since we fully expect PETA to be against eating turkeys, especially when an estimated 45+ million are killed for one holiday. But what we didn’t expect was such a specific and horrifying community note. If there is one thing to take away this holiday season, please remember: if turkeys were larger or had the technological means to farm and eat humans, their current diet reveals they likely would.

🚀 Quick Hits

UF to develop $2.3M veterinary record database with artificial intelligence [One Health]

New Zealand veterinarians call for preventing drug-resistant infections developing [NZVA] 

Monoclonal antibodies show promise as new therapy for veterinary patients [AVMA]