46. What are Emerging Threats to Your Pet’s Health? With Veterinary Infectious Disease Expert Dr. Scott Weese

Dr. Ann Hohenhaus interviews Dr. Scott Weese, a leading expert in veterinary infectious diseases and creator of the must-read Worms & Germs blog. Tune in as they discuss:

• Insights into the 2023 “mystery” canine respiratory disease
• The impact of social media and lifestyle trends on the perception of pet health
• How the social network of dogs influences the spread of disease
• The tragic situations that can arise if pets don’t receive vaccinations on time or at all
• Emerging challenges and threats that will impact the future of veterinary medicine, including climate change and antibiotic resistance

Also on this month's show: 

• Viral trending animal story of the month, featuring the raccoons who invited close to 100 guests to a Washington woman’s garden buffet
• Animal news, including the contagious smile of dolphins
• Pet Health Listener Q&A

Do you have a pet question for Dr. Hohenhaus? Email askthevet@amcny.org to have your question answered on Ask the Vet's Listener Q&A.

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Transcript

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We want to remind our listeners that this program is for informational and educational purposes only, and not intended to substitute for professional veterinary medical advice, diagnosis and treatment. The Animal Medical Center does not recommend or endorse any products or services advertised by Sirius XM. Welcome to Ask the Vet with Dr. Ann Hohenhaus. This is the place to talk about your pets and get advice for the top veterinarian from the Animal Medical Center in NYC. Hear from the leading authorities on animals and ask your questions. Now here's your host, doctor, and ho and house. Hello everyone and welcome to Ask the Vet. It's a podcast for people who love their pets and want the latest in pet health and animal news. I'm your host, Dr. Ann Hohenhaus. I'm a senior veterinarian and director of pet health information here at the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center in New York City. Now, today, I have an extra special guest Dr. Scott Weese. He's the leading expert in veterinary infectious diseases and creator of the must read Worms and Germs blog, which is also now a podcast. Stay tuned to get details on both later in the show. Dr. Weese is going to share valuable information and insights on managing infectious diseases in pets, social dynamics in pets and vaccine priorities, and also emerging health risks. So I'm really looking forward to our conversation. So stay tuned. After the trending animal. This first Maine Animal Medical Center is the only level one veterinary trauma center in New York City, and we have 114 years of being the very best place for your pet. If you're seeking advice on maintaining your pet's health, then I'm here to help. Just send me your questions to askthevet@amcny.org and I'll answer your questions on next month's show. If you missed that address again, it's askthevet@amcny.org. And if you don't have a pen or pencil to write it down, then at the break I'll give it again. And now it's time for our trending animal of the month. It's time for the internet's most talked about animal. Now, this is actually really trending animals of the month because we've got about 100 of them this time. We've all heard the phrase don't bite the hand that feeds. But what about don't feed the mouse that bites. A Washington State resident learned this the hard way after feeding raccoons in her yard for more than 30 years. What started with a small family of raccoons grew to nearly 100. As word of the raccoon buffet seemed to spread to raccoons in neighboring areas. The situation took a turn for the worse when the raccoons became aggressive, swarming the lady for food, scratching at her doors, and even surrounding her car when she tried to leave. She felt like she had nowhere else to turn, and called 911. The Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife advised her to stop feeding the raccoons if she wanted them to move on. And thankfully, the raccoons dispersed soon after the buffet disappeared and no injuries were reported. But this story is a reminder of the risks of feeding wildlife. Not only can it lead to aggressive behavior, but it also increases the chances of spreading diseases like rabies, which raccoons can carry and transmit. And thus this is the perfect trending animal of the month for our guests today. And I'm now honored to welcome Dr. Scott Weese. Dr. Weese is a veterinary internist and professor at the Ontario Veterinary College in Canada. He's also the director of the University of Guelph Center for Public Health and Zoonoses, chief of Infection control at the Ontario Veterinary College Health Sciences Center, a member of the Quadra Partite Global Leaders Group on Antimicrobial Resistance and chair of the World Health Organization Advisory Group on Critically Important Antimicrobials in Human Medicine. From my perspective, what he's most important for is writing the Worms and Germs blog, which you can find at Worms and Germs blog.com. And now host the podcast for Worms and Germs pod, and you can find That Up podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast services. Just like you can find out the vet. So, doctor, we thank you so much for coming today to ask the vet and for joining us to talk about infectious diseases. Great. Thanks for having me on. So how about that turning animal of the story? I picked it just for you because I thought it would hit a lot of your buttons. And I can't wait to hear what you have to say about 100 raccoons at a buffet in someone's backyard. Yeah. That's reasonable. Various levels of concern. Right? So we always think about rabies. Raccoon rabies is an issue depending where you are. But there are a variety of other things that we think about. There's a raccoon roundworm, a parasite. That's a pretty rare problem in people, but it's really nasty. And like you mentioned, you get these buffets of raccoons there. You know, they've got to go. And raccoons like to use we call raccoon the tree. And so you get these big accumulations of raccoon poop. And that's a risk to us. And you know they also pee and there's certain diseases we can get from that leptospirosis being another. So it kind of comes to that concept of, you know, wildlife are cool. They're fun but should watch them from a distance. The more we bridge that contact, the more we start creating a risk for us and risk for them. The more they get effectuated to us, the more risk they'll take. And sometimes that ends up bad for them. Yeah, I mean, those little, you know, masked bandits are adorable. But we've had a lot of problems in Central Park with rabid raccoons and because Central Park is a very busy place, there are lots of people that ultimately get exposed to two raccoons dangerously, and then they have to be managed with the rabies prophylaxis. So it's a problem even in an urban area like New York City. So I think the takeaway on that one is, although they're cute, don't feed them in your backyard. They they can probably find food quite well on their own. Would be my guess. So I'm an avid reader of Worms and Germs blog. I get all the updates in my inbox and have listened to your podcasts so far, which have been just wonderful. I appreciate how you cover such a wide range of topics. You know, geckos with salmonella and cats with bird flu and rabies and people, how in the world can you stay up on all that stuff? But I think to catch up more than stay office challenge, right? There's so much going on and a lot of it's, you know, when you're immersed in the infectious disease world, which is what I am, you see all these things. It's still a fairly small world when it comes to infectious diseases and animals, especially companion animals. So we tend to have a pretty good idea what's going on. And I get a lot of great comments, feedback and suggestions from readers and from colleagues who say, I saw this, or what about this? I get a lot of questions that I get from people based on their own animals or cases clinicians have seen or just, you know, random questions turn into a really interesting post because, you know, often if one person has the question, more people do. So it's a good forum to get that information out. Yeah. I also like, we'll often take call in questions from this program and then write them as a blog later on or some variation of that. And so a lot of my inspiration comes from my patients, or, or the owners of those patients as it comes for, for you. So last year, there was a lot of concern surrounding a mystery respiratory illness in dogs. And your insights provided much needed clarity during that time. So for those people who might not be up on that mystery illness, why was there so much uncertainty and what, you know, what could be done to prevent a similar situation from happening in the future? Yeah, we still don't really know what happened. I think we have some ideas and essentially what the concern was. There were reports of a lot of sick dogs with respiratory disease in various parts of mainly the US, also in Canada, and reports of dogs dying more often than we would expect from respiratory disease. And that obviously raises a lot of concerns. Do we have something new that's going on? Is there a new virus or we have a new flu virus introduced and it can spread like wildfire. So those are things that we we definitely pay attention to. People talking to us, saying this looks weird or I'm seeing more of this, but at the same time, we have to temper that, realizing we have really bad data. We don't do surveillance well on companion animals because there's no money in it. You know, livestock. We get a bit of surveillance dogs and cats. There's just not much done. So we're often flying fairly blind. And that creates a problem in the social media age because you think about New York City. I don't know how many dogs are in New York City, but, you know, a few million dogs are in New York City. What percentage of dogs coughing any day? I don't know, a small percentage, but a small percentage of a couple million dogs is a lot of dogs that background noise, and we don't talk about it because it's just normal. But then what happens if someone has a dog that's sick and they go on social media and say, hey, my dog was sick and I was at this park the other day, I was at Central Park where all these dogs are, right? And then you get 20, 30, 50. People say, yeah, my dog's coughing too. And does that mean we have an outbreak, or does that mean we're just getting a really small fraction of that normal disease that's there, and it's being amplified based on social media, and it's really hard to sort that out. But media, social media wrap these things up really quickly. So we had headlines of mystery virus, dogs dying, thousands of dogs affected, and we were still trying to sort out whether there was anything new going on. And we looked in a few different ways to get different types of data. It looks like, yes, certainly we see respiratory disease coming. Going goes up and down all the time. You know, you get one dog, a dog part that can infect 20 dogs, and in fact a few more, you get a little blip and it goes down. So there was some of that happening, but nothing convincing that we are seeing this huge difference. And it might have been the perfect storm of a few things we've got. You know, Covid still has an impact because people know we didn't get their dogs vaccinated as much. It changed our behavior patterns, how we are interacting. People are working from home a lot more in some areas. And if you're not going to the office, maybe your dog's not going to daycare and it's not getting vaccinated against kennel cough. We've got all these different behavioral things. We've had more dogs. We had a lot of dogs in Covid. So more fuel to the fire with more animals, changes in how we interact, changes in social media. And it was probably just the usual suspects doing their usual thing, probably at a higher rate in some areas, didn't seem to be anything that was, you know, a new virus, a new bacterium, a change in our normal ones. It was just we see a bit more disease in some areas and we're seeing a lot. We're talking about the baseline level of disease and in other areas I also think that there definitely changes in New York City people's working patterns, and there are still people who work from home much more than they did before the pandemic. So they recognize when that dog is off or that dog is coughing a little more because they don't leave the house at seven in the morning and come home at seven at night, they actually are there, you know, all day long. And the dog coughs. And then I think it also has made people more flexible. Or maybe it's made bosses more flexible. And so if people are working from home, the boss knows that if they're taking the dog to the vet, they'll get their work done later. And I think that has changed. I think that fuels some of the busyness that veterinary practices have, but also probably fuels my perception. There were more coughing dogs because they don't just cough at home. The the family brings them in to see me. So I think it was a big, huge, multifactorial, perfect storm of all kinds of different things. But you guys who looked, found no new viruses, no different. You know, it's the usual actors that were causing coughing and dogs. Right? Yeah. It was all the same stuff. And again, when we look at cases where we diagnosed it, which is a which is a small subset, because if it's your dog, you know, we don't tend to do a lot of diagnostic testing on dogs where it's, you know, what we call a kennel cough, that regular kind of mild respiratory disease, because it's not going to change what we do. But even we look at that small subset, they got tested. It was the same bacteria, same viruses, same relative numbers. There are some really good labs doing searching for new viruses. Nothing's come up so far, which I think means there's not anything that's going to come up. And it didn't spread like a new virus. If you think back to if you remember a canine influenza, and when it emerged in the US in 2015in Chicago and it boomed like these clinics were seeing a large number of dogs, like a kennel would call up and say, I've got 40 sick dogs were on the way. And that's literally one vet told me that. So these are huge numbers of dogs. You get this massive spread because everyone is naive. They don't have an immune response to this virus, so everyone's susceptible. And if we had a new virus causing this, I think we would have seen it boom. A little bit more at the pattern would just be different than what we saw here. So I think everything still really fits with our usual suspects and changes in behavior. Like you said, going to the vet is different too, because most of the time these dogs get better on their own in a couple of days. And if you're busy, you say, I'll wait till tomorrow. You know you're not going to go to the vets. The dogs can get better if you're really tuned into that dog and if you're home and you're walking the dog 2 or 3 times a day because I need to stretch my legs, I'm going to go outside. Your dog might have a lot more contacts without it's kennel cough vaccine because it's not going to day care. So you're right. I think it's all these things layered on each other. Well, and in in New York City, when the influenza made it this Far East, we had veterinary practices. Who closed because they every dog got it. They it caused an epidemic and they're waiting room and they just had to shut down and try and break the cycle. And then I'm old enough to remember when parvo virus first came into dogs. And that was a nightmare. There were sick dogs everywhere. Really, really sick dogs, as you know. And now we know how to take care of parvo puppies. But nobody knew how to take care of them in 1976 or whenever that outbreak occurred. So the pattern is very different than than those two new viruses, which were sort of not exactly new viruses. They just were doing what viruses do, which is rearrange themselves. So and you alluded to it in your answer to this question about dogs, social networks that if dogs don't go to daycare, their social network is different. But if you take your dog out to stretch your legs and take it to the dog, run for an hour while you take a break from working at home, then that dog has a different social network. So can you talk about how the networks that dogs have influenced the spread of disease? Yeah, it's a good question. I don't think we really know. We're just starting to to think about that. It's not something I think that we've paid a lot of attention to in the past. It's we assume all dogs are the same, and we know whether or not they have different types of contacts, different numbers of contacts, and different risks of contacts. So you may have a dog that goes to daycare, but it's a small daycare where it's five that the same dogs, that's all that dog sees doesn't go in an off leash park. Versus you may have a dog that goes to a park and encounters five dogs, but those are five different dogs every day. And who knows what those dogs are doing in their health status and their vaccination status. So when we're thinking about it, we're thinking about, you know, how many dogs does a dog encounter and what types of contacts are they? How close are they? Just walking down the street next to a dog is different than sniffing. It's not licking its face. And how high risk are those animals? So a dog encountering other animals that haven't been vaccinated, or you don't know their vaccination status that might be sick, might be young puppies that haven't been vaccinated yet, is different than interacting with your neighbor's dog they see every day or your family member's dog. So looking at social networks kind of works at, you know, trying to get an idea of the range of that. And we see some dogs that have very solitary lifestyles. They don't see other dogs, or maybe they see one other dog. And the opposite extreme, we have dogs that we'll see hundreds of dogs every couple of weeks because they're going to daycares, they're going to events, and it gets expanded when they're traveling for accompanying their owners on vacations, or they're going to show. So they might go to a show where there are 200 dogs for an event, and those 200 dogs are coming from, you know, 100 different areas, and those 200 dogs have contacts with who knows how many dogs you start layering on this. How many indirect contacts has this dog had in the last two weeks? That number can be pretty big sometimes, and that's influencing risk because if my dog, I have a dog, we live in the country. He doesn't see other dogs unless we take him somewhere. He'll go to some some trails around our place, rarely see a dog. He sees a couple family members, dogs or kind of adults, low risk. So he's pretty low risk for exposure to most things apart from certain times of his life. And we also have to remember that things change. So he's got a pretty solitary lifestyle. We rent a cottage for a couple weeks every year, and he goes to daycare because having him 24 seven isn't exactly a vacation for us. He's a young lab, so he needs to go somewhere entire himself out. But that's his time when he's interacting with 20 dogs or other people that are vacationing from other areas. So his risk is really, really low. His contact networks are really small to write high and then really low again in a couple of weeks. So it's just a matter of trying to frame when we're thinking about disease risk vaccination programs. What is the risk to this dog based on all those components of its lifestyle? Not just the fact that's a dog? Or does it go to daycare? Yes or no? Does it go to a park? Yes. No. There's more to it than that. Well, in in in New York, we see people who say, my dog doesn't need flea and tick medication or heartworm medication because it's cold. And so we don't have fleas and ticks and heart and mosquitoes for heartworms. And then they take the dog to Florida and then they do. The dog comes home scratching its full head off, and they're like, well, what? Why? What's wrong? And I'm like, oh, fleas. He's got fleas because they they take them out of their their low contact environment. And all of a sudden the pet then is exposed to fleas or heartworms or something else in Florida or wherever the people decide to take it. So that's another thing I think that's important in thinking about disease risk is where are you taking that pet and what are the different diseases that that pet might encounter in in your vacation spot. So you're you're probably more worried about diseases at the cottage from the people in daycare where my clientele tends to go someplace warm, where there are parasites that they could come in contact with vaccinations, leptospirosis, you know, one disease in dogs, it's kind of regionally relevant. And I think it's a challenge for us as vets to get that information because people don't necessarily think about it. And I don't think we do a very good job querying it, especially at the depth of it. So, you know, someone's you ever travel with your dog and they'll say no. And then it's a flip. Flip it around. Does your dog ever leave town? Oh yeah. We go to my parents. They're a couple hours away, and we go to wherever and wherever. Okay, that's travel. But because it's a normal activity, we don't think it's travel. It's like nutrition history. What does your dog eat? All the stuff in that red bag. Okay. What passes your dog's lips? Well, that lasts, you know, the scraps that he gets. You know, maybe you get some of the cat's food. It's it's something that we have to put a little more nuance into. And it's something important for owners to to talk to their vets about. So I do this, I do that, and we even see this with imported dogs, which are a big issue because they bring in a lot of different diseases. And it's amazing how sometimes we don't know, like it might be a year or two after someone's been working on this dog as a vet, do they realize this dog came from pick the country because no one mentioned it and it's a dog. You can't really tell, and then you start struggling to try to find out what's going on. The owner would say, well, you know, this dog came from Greece. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It really might matter for what we're dealing with. And that's a communication issue that we have to think about and do a better job at. Yeah. And in the New York City that's not uncommon that people scoop up a dog wherever they happen to be on holiday. And come back. Although with the change in rules, for importing dogs into the U.S. not going to be so easy. But we at AMC have definitely seen dogs with live shot at ISIS because the dog came from Greece, because guess what? We don't have live franchises in New York City. So they're they're definitely we do have leptospirosis in New York City, though, and I, you know, that that that brings up the point about vaccinations is if I have a dog that either is in a pocketbook or, you know, in the owner's apartment and doesn't go anywhere, probably it's lepto risk is really low. But but there are dogs that never leave the five boroughs of New York that get lepto or people that go to their weekend home in Connecticut, Massachusetts, you know, you name it. And upstate New York and those dogs are definitely exposed to lepto. So that brings us to a good point to talk about vaccinations for a minute. Do you see a rise in the anti-vaccination sentiment parallel to that that's going on in people? Oh, there's no doubt that we do. We see that and people that don't want to get their dogs vaccinated at all, and people that want to start vaccinating. And there are reasons to be extending the vaccine intervals. We can only do that with some vaccine. And so far, but it's definitely something we've seen. And it was a survey done in the US a year or two ago, which showed the surprisingly high number of pet owners start the vaccines could cause problems like autism in dogs. So there is a lot of misinformation and there's a lot of fear. And the problem is you can find things very easily on the internet, and it's really tough for your average person to sort out what's legitimate and what's not. And there's also there are trust issues because you'll see things on the internet while veterinarians make money vaccinating. So that's why they want you to vaccinate. Yeah we do. We have to acknowledge that we do make money vaccinating, but we're more interested in getting the animal in. And I think if you talk to most vets, the vaccines are an entry point to the clinic, which is one of their values. But, you know, we'd rather vaccinate as little as we need to and see the animal as much as we have to. Yeah. And that's I agree, people are reluctant. I've got an email in my inbox right now and the client has two small grandchildren and she's like, well, I don't really want to come in now. And the rabies vaccine is due now. And could we could we negotiate and vaccinate the dog for rabies in March? And I was like, I don't think that's a good idea because you have two small grandsons, and I don't want to put your dog in a tough spot. If some grandson decides to yank on your dog's ears and the dog bites the grandson, then the health department's all over it. Not that I think her dog really has rabies, but. But the health department doesn't operate that way. At least the one we have in New York doesn't. And if there's a human exposure, they're very unhappy about a dog being unvaccinated. Yeah, a lot more dogs die from the public health response than from rabies in in North America. Yeah. You know, maybe go overseas kills 59,000 people a year in North America. We don't have that dog variant, but dogs can get raccoon rabies, bat rabies, skunk rabies. So it definitely does happen. But you're right. One of the big concerns we have is the response. Because if your dog is vaccinated and it gets exposed to rabies, the response is a lot different than if your dog's unvaccinated. If your dog bites the kid, then there's that same response. We watched that dog for ten days. But you know, public health is going to raise the question of why isn't this dog properly vaccinated? But for me, the ones that are the worst scenarios that I see when it comes to rabies vaccination or non vaccination is when you have a puppy or a kitten, then it's been exposed. So you've got this young puppy goes outside and it tangles with a raccoon and you know there's raccoon rabies in your area. So that's an exposure. If the raccoon is not around a test, we have to assume that's that's an exposure that this puppy is properly vaccinated around here. And I think it's fairly standard. We give them a booster and it's a 45 day observation period, which means don't let it off the leash, keep it under control. If it's not vaccinated, that could be a 3 or 6 month strict quarantine. That's lock it in the bathroom. It doesn't go outside with a couple layers of barriers. You can't do this in an apartment building very well. I can do an elevator to keep people away. For a puppy. That's a devastating start to their life. And a lot of these animals get euthanized because they just people don't want to do it, and they realize the behavioral issues will be so high. So we see animals that are euthanized just because of the quarantine they would need, and we would have prevented that by vaccinating them as early as we can. So when people start trying to say, let's not vaccinate the puppy dog six months, well, that's 3 to 4 month period. We start vaccinating at three months and they're pretty curious. At three months ago went outside and say, hi, that's a cute squirrel. Let me go play it. Oh, there's a raccoon. Let me go see that. Right. That's how they end up with these early exposures. And it's not that often. But I see it enough where if we vaccinate the puppy at three months to be fine because they didn't, then we're having the euthanasia or quarantine discussion. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that the although most veterinarians see mostly dogs, dogs go to the veterinarian much more often than cats do. But right now I think we're having a cat rabies problem in in North America. Am I right on that point? Yeah. In the US you'll see a lot more cats and dogs. And part of that is cat behavior. They're out there catching things, maybe bats tangling with wildlife. And we just don't see cats as often. Right. So the vaccine coverage is poor in cats. They have a lot more uncontrolled outdoor access. So you are those two things together. And we see more rabies and cats in some areas. And the US is one for sure. Yeah. And that's what we'll have. I think we had a box of rabid kittens in a parking lot in Staten Island or something like that, which of course someone was trying to give them away. And then there was a huge number of exposures to those, kittens. So it's always little animals are really a concern. And you should be very cautious about where you're a new puppy or kitten in your household has come from. So with all your experience in infectious diseases and do not take risks, are there any emerging challenges or specific threats that you think will have an impact on the future? Veterinary medicine. If you had a crystal ball to look forward? Yeah, we could talk an hour about this, probably because I think we've got emerging disease issues and H5n1 influenza is a textbook example of that, where we've got a lot of things going on right now that are a bit concerning, and this just devastates cats. We have climate change that's impacting things. We're seeing changes in ranges of ticks in particular, and tick borne diseases. I grew up never seeing a tick. It was only a few years ago we started seeing them where I am, and we're now we're getting into a pretty endemic tick area with Lyme disease moving in. And that's not unique in a lot of places in North America, expanding ranges of different things. Leptospirosis. We've mentioned a couple times, you know that's climate impacted. So if it's wetter you know, warm moist conditions Lepto likes doesn't like to be dried out. So it can go both ways. Some areas we see decreases in risk increases the risk. Leishmania you mentioned, we've grad student doing some modeling on that. Vectors for life. Meaning as climate changes, you say, okay, we don't have insects that can spread lice mania, that parasite in Canada, in the US right now in the U.S., you've got some that probably can. And as south as that moves, you're going to find parts of the US where it's going to be more amenable to transmission, just like we see with people. If you look at Florida, things like dengue, a Zika virus, or a lot of mosquito borne viruses that are now plausible risks in those areas that we win them in thinking about. So we've got emerging diseases. We have climate change associated diseases. I think we have more animals in general, because we have more people and we have more pet ownership. So that's fuel to the fire, especially when we have more unvaccinated and more roaming animals. Cost of veterinary care is a challenge so that, you know, limit some of the things that we can do. So the you layer a lot of social things on top of disease aspects. And there's always going to be something new. And then kind of the big one in my area is antibiotic resistance, which has changed a lot of what we do in clinics, especially at a referral clinic like yours, where you're seeing the more complex cases, you know, your surgeons, your dermatologists in particular, a lot more antibiotic resistant bacteria, which are harder to treat and more expensive to treat, and lead us to having to have discussions on, okay, how far do we go with some of these drugs that are fairly last resort? It's a bit of an easier conversation for an individual dog or a cat than it is for large numbers of food animals, but still some tough conversations. And in some areas, restrictions on what vets can do because of those concerns. Well, yeah, the antibiotic issue is really interesting. One of the topics that I try and highlight in my blog are research papers written by FMC veterinarians that have a have a translation to the pet owner. And so I have a blog coming up where the AMC er looked at catheter infections. So place an IV catheter in a patient for all kinds of reasons. And they looked at the culture of these catheters after the catheters had been in a certain amount of time and said, there's are bacteria on these catheters. And their hypothesis was the catheters placed in e.R would be more likely to have infection because it was an ER as opposed to a catheter replacement surgery. And what was interesting was there was no difference between those two groups. So blew a hole in their hypothesis. But what they found were a bunch of resistant bacteria on some of these catheters. And so that made me say, well, the story then, for the pet owner in out of this particular article is not catheters are dangerous, but don't ask your veterinarian for antibiotics if if they say no, your pet doesn't need it, just believe them and do not ask another time sort of thing. So what do you have advice for pet owners on on antibiotics? Because they always want you to treat something. Yeah. And I think it's a matter of we often approach this well I won't hurt. Right. And we have to think about the least harms approaches and the cost benefit. And we know that antibiotics have firms. And that's very commonly making your dog or cat vomit have diarrhea. But antibiotic resistance is something else too. And you don't want that in your animal because let's say you've got a dog that has a skin infection or it has allergies and more common, right. And you can say, okay, we could spend money on this diet and there are various things to figure out what's going on. So no, I'd rather not do that. Which means we're probably gonna end up with skin infections. And if have skin infections and we say, okay, if they're superficial, let's just treat them topically with chlorhexidine. A biocide not an antibiotic. It just, you know, it's a good disinfectant for the skin. And but if you don't do that, you say, okay, I want the antibiotics for the antibiotics will work. But not for very long because your dog's got underlying disease. You're not controlling. You're not willing to do the non antibiotic approach with bathing. So at some point we're going to run into a resistant infection. And we're not going to very good treatment options for you. It's going to be more expensive or more toxic or worst case scenario we don't have a drug for that. So we need to think about a couple of things. There. One is just health. And this is something we're working on globally with humans and animals is help. People that aren't sick, animals that aren't sick don't need antibiotics. So the more we can improve health and that's nutrition. That's veterinary care, that's vaccination, deworming, the whole gamut. Everything we can do to make your animal as healthy as possible. We're going to reduce the need for antibiotics and reduce the cost because, you know, healthy animals don't cost as much as sick animals. So we need to maximize health. And then we also need to realize that if there's something that needs to be done, often, putting that effort in initially is worth it. If your dog is prone to ear infections or skin infections, or urinary tract infections, if we can figure out what causing that, we can't always convert. What's causing that? We can prevent a lot of damage down the road and a lot of resistance down the road. And if we get to the point where you need an antibiotic, it's just a matter of using it properly and doing everything else we can, but we don't want to say is, you know, I don't think this is going to work. How about we try an antibiotic? Okay. Let's go ahead. So, you know, sometimes we have to do we have to do. But that's a last resort is we want to use them when we think they've got a good chance of helping when they're needed. And when your pet is sick. Yeah. So we want to be convinced that you need it. It's the cost benefit. Right? What's the benefit of the antibiotic? It's got to be clear that we need it. What are the risks for the antibiotic? Because in some situations where you might have an infection but it's really mild or we can treat it topically and the risks from the antibiotic outweigh the benefits. And we just haven't tuned our brains to be thinking about it that way. It's just a matter of, you know, antibiotics or magic drugs. They either work or they don't. But then that's all there is to it. And there's a lot more to it. So I'm getting a message that we have used up our time, and I still have a whole other page of questions for you, but I think I'll close by asking you to tell us how can people find your blog, your podcast, and what's coming up on them. So the the blog is Worms and Germs blog.com, and a podcast is Worms and Germs pod. We're not very creative on our podcast name. So I don't really plan too far ahead on those, to be honest. I just we just did a rabies podcast that's going online for a mission, rabies, which is a group that goes out internationally and they vaccinate millions of dogs, they educate millions of kids. So we kind of go from some of these global things to here's an interesting specific case, a lot on avian influenza right now, just because it's a hot topic. So for me, it's interspersing what's going on in the news, what are people asking about and then trying to pick up the fun things and ideally some things that are kind of interesting, a light mixed in there. So there's not necessarily a lot of strategy going into it, but things that I find interesting are useful, and it would be good to get out to the general public and occasionally something good about the dog, the, the, the very energetic Labrador crops up in the blog as well. Well, I want to thank you, Scott, so much for joining me today. And be sure to our listeners to tune in to his Worms and Germs blog and also the podcast. Great. Thanks for the fun. And now I know that keeping your pet healthy is very important to you. And with that said, I hope you'll reach out to me if you have a question about your pet's health and I'll respond to your question on next month's out of that podcast. Once again, that email is AsktheVet@amcny.org, we have a short break coming up, but stay tuned because there's lots of interesting animal news stories when we return. We're back with Dr. Ann Hohenhaus on Ask the Vet. Welcome back to Ask the Vet. And now it's time for our animal news. It's time for animal headlines, the biggest animal news from across the world. Our first story today is about dolphins. And researchers think that dolphins might actually be grinning at each other and they also think that that smile is contagious from one dolphin to the next. That we all know about dolphins, that they're very famous for their vocal communication between each other. But researchers in Europe have found that bottlenose dolphins also used a relaxed, open mouth expression during play. Much like humans and other social animals. So this study suggests that the dolphin smile is a visual cue that keeps interactions playful. So scientists reviewed about 80 hours of footage and found that dolphins offer mirror each other's expression during play. In nearly 90% of cases, dolphins use the gesture when their playmate could see them, and the grin was frequently returned with a second grin. No mouths were observed open during aggressive encounters, supporting the idea that this expression signals fun. This grinning behavior mirrors what we see in social animals like monkeys, dogs, and even people who use last places to show playfulness and prevent conflict. While more research is needed to understand how dolphins use this expression, these findings highlight the importance of visual communication in dolphins, offering new insights into shared behaviors across both land and sea. Mammals. Now, our second story is about pets going to the veterinarian. Owning a pet brings love, companionship, and a sense of purpose, but it also comes with responsibility trips to the veterinarian, emergencies, and medication administration. When these situations arise, it can be difficult for employees to take time off from work to care for a sick pet. So in response to that situation, New York City Councilman Sean Abreu, you is introducing a bill that would allow workers to use paid sick leave to care for their pets and service animals. Currently earned Safe and Sick Time Act provides paid sick leave for employee illness or that of a family member, but Councilman Abreu's proposed amendment would allow paid sick leave to cover care for service animals and legally kept pets. Only a few places, like Emeryville, California, have similar laws where sick leave can be used to care for guide dogs or service dogs. The motivation behind this amendment ties into addressing New York City's mental health crisis. Pets reduce stress and the ability to take sick leave for a pet's care would relieve a significant burden for many workers. It could also help reduce animal surrenders, making it easier for people to keep their pets even if their pet is sick. After all, sick leave covers family members, and shouldn't our pets and service animals also be included in that list? And our last story of today is about words and cats, so the ability of humans to associate words with objects is a cornerstone of language development. But can cats make these associations as well? In a recent study at Japan's Azabu University, researchers tested the cats ability to form word picture associations. In the study, short animations were paired with made up words such as “keraru” and “parumo”, and these animations were played for cats on a loop until the cats looked away and then after a break, the researchers played the same animation, but the spoken words with the animation were reversed, and the studies showed that cats gauged longer and had greater pupil dilation. In response to the changed audio, indicating they had formed associations between the original words and images. So it seems that cats, just like dogs, can understand much of what their owners might say. And the difference between those two species may actually just be whether or not the cats choose to react to it. And now we have questions from our listeners. First question today comes from Melanie B.

Melanie's question is: 40:16

hello, I have a seven week old kitten and was wondering the amount of food and the number of times a day I should feed him. Currently I've been giving him a fourth of a can of a paté or kittens with a bit of water four times a day. This adds up to one can a day, and one can is equal to 94 calories. I'm concerned that I'm not feeding him enough. So, Melanie, the easy way that you can assess whether or not you're feeding your kitten enough food is to weigh him. And if your kitten is gaining weight every day because kittens gain weight on a daily basis, then you have a pretty good idea. If your kitten is getting enough food. But the real way to do it is to have your veterinarian help you calculate how much food a seven week old kitten should get, how many calories, and then use the the information you already know which is one can is 94 calories and figure out how much the kitten needs to eat based on known calorie requirements of young kittens. Kittens actually take a lot of calories, because they're growing so quickly. And so weighing your kitten helps to give you an idea at home, and you need to weigh that kitten not on your bathroom scale, but actually maybe on your kitchen scale by getting a little cardboard box, putting the box on the scale, tear the weight to zero, and then put the kitten in the box and weigh the kitten that way. A bathroom scale for people is not accurate enough for a kitten that probably weighs less than a kilo, or probably a half a pound is what a seven week old kitten is going to weigh. So I think some professional advice from your veterinarian and a daily weigh in should help. Having your kitten right on track to being the perfect body weight. Our second question is from Betty in New York. Question is, New York has declared the Eastern equine encephalitis virus as an imminent threat. Should we be concerned about this virus affecting our pets? If yes, what signs are we looking for and what preventative measures can we take? So Eastern equine encephalitis or E is a horse virus and it is spread to horses by mosquito. So in the summer and early fall is when we see outbreaks of this disease. And as Dr. Weese alluded to earlier in this show, because our environment is warming, the distribution of parasites like mosquitoes is expanding because the weather is warmer and mosquitoes have more territory that suits, the environment that they prefer to live in. And so that probably has something to do with this e, outbreak that we're seeing in the northeast right now. But because this is an equine virus, we are not concerned about this virus affecting our dog and cat pets because this is a virus adapted to horses. However, we know that heartworms are spread by mosquitoes as well. And so keeping your pet out of mosquito areas, there are mosquito repellent monthly treatments for dogs, and of course, keeping your dog, indoors at dusk and dawn, which is when mosquitoes are most active, will help to protect your dog from mosquito borne illnesses like heartworms that can affect your dog. Okay, thanks so much for sending in those great questions, folks. Remember, I'm always happy to answer questions and you just need to email me at AskTheVet@amcny.org. And when we come back from our break, we're going to have important information from AMC's Usdan Institute. We're back with Dr. Ann Hohenhaus on Ask the Vet and welcome back to Ask the Vet. And now it's time for information from AMC's Usdan institute to help you take the best care of your pet possible. The holiday season is almost upon us, and while including our furry family members and Thanksgiving festivities is tempting, the menu for pets can be tricky. Even a small piece of turkey skin or a bitter gravy can lead to pancreatitis, a life threatening condition and many other holiday staples can be toxic to pets. If you'd like to share some of your Thanksgiving meal with your dog or cat. Here are the safe options that you can choose from your plate skinless, unseasoned Turkey. Plain green beans. That means green beans. Before you put the, onions and the almonds and the mushrooms on them. Mashed potatoes or sweet potatoes without seasoning. And skip the butter apple slices before you put them in the pie. Or another good snack for everyone, and especially for dogs who have that sweet to remember. Even safe foods can cause issues if you feed too much of them, so limit the portions to a spoonful of each. For pets that love to scavenge, be sure to clean up all the leftovers promptly and keep trash cans securely covered so that your dog does not help themselves to the turkey carcass that you've carefully put into the trash. If you have guests, remind them not to give table scraps to your pets, no matter how cute they are when they sit up and beg like a little gopher. And for more information on pet safe foods and holiday tips, visit the Usdan Institute's Pet Health Library at amcny.org. And in the top, ribbon, you'll see a light blue box that takes us to the Pet Health Library. On Thursday, November 21st at 6 p.m., the Usdan Institute will be hosting an online event featuring Annie Grossman, who is a certified dog trainer and owner of the school for dogs. And she's going to talk about her new book, How to Train Your Dog With Love and Science. This critically acclaimed book presents a modern science based approach to changing behavior in your dog, and argues for abandoning folk wisdom about canine learning and training techniques rooted in coercion and force. For more information and to register, go to amcny.org and click on events. And remember that these are zoom events, so you need to register so we can send you the zoom link to attend. If you're interested in free access to timely and relevant pet health articles, upcoming pet health events, video tutorials, and other pet parent resources, be sure to check out AMC's Usdan Institute for Animal Health Education at amcny.org. And I want to take just a moment to thank Dr. Scott Weese for joining me today. You can learn more about him and subscribe to his blog at Worms and Germs blog.com. Be sure to check out his new podcast, which is Worms and Germs Pod, and you can find it on all major podcast platforms, just like you can find out about on all major podcast platforms. I'll answer your questions on next month's Ask the Vet show, and all you have to do is send me an email at AskTheVet@amcny.org, and your question can be featured on our show. The Ask the Vet podcast can be accessed on the Sirius app and other major platforms for podcasts, as well as the AMC website. All of this is thanks to AMC's long standing partnership with Sirius XM. Don't forget to check us out on social media, and especially check after Halloween, because all our fun Halloween costumes that the our teams in the hospital are entering in a competition will be featured on our Facebook page, which is the Animal Medical Center on Twitter and Instagram @amcny. Please take a moment to give us the vet a review and like and subscribe. So you get all our new episodes of the House of that podcast, and I'll look forward to see you all next month for another episode of Ask the Vet.