Hi and welcome to the Animal Welfare Junction. This is your host, Dr. G, and our music is written and produced by Mike Sullivan. Today's guest is Dr. Jeanette O'Quinn. She's an associate professor at The Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine. Welcome to the Junction, Dr. O'Quin. Thanks for having me. Can you start by letting people know what is your background and what you do at the College of Vet Med?

Yeah, I, I've been a veterinarian for 30 years. That's a little hard to say out loud, especially on a podcast. Um, but most of my career I spent in small animal practice and animal shelter medicine. I took a detour into veterinary public health for several years where I worked for the Ohio Department of Health. And then I came to Ohio State where I teach all of those things. I spend a lot of my time, um, teaching infectious diseases and small animal. uh, medicine, outbreak response, um, zoonotic diseases, which can be transmitted from animals to people. Um, so basically small animal population health and welfare.

So we are here today because we're going to discuss this respiratory disease that is getting spread through the media as a very scary, mysterious illness. And I have been receiving a lot of questions from both shelters, the community, and even some veterinarians. about what's happening, what's going on, and there's so much mixed information. So I wanted to try to get to the bottom of what we know, what we don't know, and what we need to do to do better for the dogs. So I know that this disease started in Oregon is where it first the first cases started being seen. So do we know what kind of disease is? Is this a virus? Is this a bacteria? Is it both?

Well, we don't know. There's a lot that we don't know about what's causing this. Um, but what we do know is it causes very similar signs to a lot of other viruses and bacteria that cause respiratory disease in dogs. So I think it's really important to kind of take a step back and look at, look at what we do know. We have outbreaks of respiratory disease in dogs that are popping up in different states in different areas of the country. And, and honestly, this is something that we're used to, something that happens all the time. We see cases sporadically, we see outbreaks sporadically, especially associated with population settings. Locations where dogs are living in groups or staying in groups for periods of time. And, um, what we don't know about this mystery illness is, is it really a mystery? Or are we seeing, outbreaks like we always do of a variety of different pathogens, different viruses and bacteria that are causing this? It may be something that we don't see as commonly, but we are very well aware of or there may be something new in the mix. We really don't know at this point.

Is this something that we should be treating, since we don't know, with the same concern of risk of respiratory disease as we do for things that we know about, like kennel cough?

Absolutely. In fact, I would consider this kennel cough. Uh, the signs are exactly the same. We'll see the coughing, sneezing, maybe fever, lethargy. They're just listless and tired. And unfortunately, a small percentage of kennel cough cases do progress and become more severe. So we may actually develop pneumonia and even death. Fortunately, this is not very common. Um, but this is exactly what we're seeing with this, this mystery illness. So, I really don't think there's anything to panic about or anything to be overly concerned about. This is something that veterinarians have a lot of experience dealing with and managing in our patients. And treating that. And the way it's transmitted is the same, the way we manage it, it's the same.

You know, I was looking when I was researching, I saw that there was a similar outbreak last year, and it was unknown what, what really caused it. And I remember when I was in practice at my emergency clinic about four or five years ago, there was something very similar and animals were going through the same thing as far as like very, very acute, very rapid developing respiratory symptoms. And then there were some animals that were succumbing to the disease, were developing pneumonia and getting really sick. So this could potentially be a similar disease complex than what we have been seeing in the past?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Very similar. And like I said, just a minute ago, there may be, we may not actually be seeing an outbreak of one thing. We may be looking at outbreaks of multiple different things and we're just connecting them because we're all able to talk to each other about them so much more readily. So we, we, we really don't know. But yeah, it, it looks, it's in, in my mind, this is kennel cough and that's, that's how we manage it.

What are the ways that these diseases are going to be transmitted?

So these respiratory disease, all of them, not just whatever may be out there right this minute, are airborne. So when dogs cough and sneeze. They transmit virus or bacteria through the droplets and in the air, and that's how other dogs get exposed. So really, the greatest concern when you're spending a lot of time around a lot of other dogs in close proximity.

I know when the outbreak that I saw several years ago, I remember a family that had multiple dogs and everybody got sick and one of the dogs did die from it, but it was a dog that was elderly. So is it something to think about that there are going to be some dogs that are more susceptible than others?

Definitely. Um, you know, what we're hearing from the cases out there right now that are being reported is that, you know, any dog can get sick with this. And that makes sense, right? But those that have more severe outcomes are, are likely dealing with other issues, other health issues as well. So they may be sick with something else, they may have a disease, they may be older, something that makes their immune response not as robust as we would like it to be.

From what I have read, it says that dogs tend to go from normal to being pretty sick in only about two to three days, so it's something that occurs really rapid. Do you know about how long it's lasting and how these dogs are being treated?

So, that's a great question. This, um, this short onset, two to three days, tracks with many other causes of kettle cough. Um, how long it lasts really is quite variable. Some of them are recovering in a week, two weeks or so even less in some cases, but they're feeling a lot better much faster, but they still have a little bit of a cough. And then some cases are lasting a couple of weeks. And that's, that's one of the things we're hearing most often with this is that it's lasting longer than they expected. And there can be a lot of reasons for that. One, there's some individual variability. So maybe we're just hearing about the ones that are lasting longer. We're not hearing as much about those that are, that are resolving really quickly. Um, but also how much damage does this virus or bacteria cause? So if it causes damage in our respiratory system, it takes a little while for that to heal, even when the pathogen is not there doing anything anymore. And so those cases can kind of last a couple of weeks. We also may have secondary infections. So this is when you have an infection that weakens your response, and makes it much easier for other causes of disease to come in and set up their own infections. And so we may have these like super infections where there's more than one thing going on. And so you could be getting better for one thing and then get get something else and something else. Um, we see this a lot, especially in population settings like shelters.

I think as humans, we can kind of relate, right, because we'll get sick, we'll have like a cough, we'll get whatever disease, and then we feel great, but we still have this nagging cough that will last for a week, two weeks, a month. So the cough is just a symptom of the irritation but it doesn't mean that you actually are sick, that your pet needs antibiotics, that it needs antivirals, that it needs anything else. So. Comparing this to humans, actually, how likely is it that these respiratory complexes of animals can affect humans or other animals?

The ones that we know about, very, very unlikely. They're, most of them we are very confident are not going to cause any human cases. There's only one that we have some concern about, in those who are immunocompromised, and that is incredibly rare as well. So, as far as general daily concerns, really not not a concern and that's we're not seeing any human cases associated with these or any cat cases associated with these that are being reported and looked at right now. So yeah, wouldn't wouldn't have any concern. I mean, no more concern than is the normal small rare level of concern that we should always have just to keep ourselves safe.

And one other thing is, like, not every animal has extensive testing, right, so, uh, you know, if we, if we see somebody coughing because of everything that's happening right now with COVID everybody immediately assumes that it's COVID. So it doesn't mean that it is. You could have the flu, you could have something else. So could this be, you know, some of these cases just be something regular that is affecting animals that are just simply not vaccinated to protect them from the diseases that cause kennel cough, including influenza.

Yeah, absolutely. Um, so kennel cough, which again is caused by, um, any of a number of viruses and bacteria that we're aware of is the, it's the most common respiratory infection that we see in dogs and we see it all the time, right? I'm sure you saw it a lot in practice. We all do. Um, it's the common cold for dogs and, um, everything that we. You know, no for humans really applies here as well. So crap. What was your question?

Uh, if this can do something like that, we know already, and it's just affecting animals that are unvaccinated.

I didn't think that was your question. Where was I headed? Um, we can do all that again. There was two things that I wanted to mention. One was how similar was the human condition. And then the other one was. What did you ask? It wasn't about vaccines. It was about,

I said, test. I said, not all animals have extensive testing. Could this be something that we know that is like influenza or that is affecting animals that are just simply unvaccinated?

Yeah, absolutely. And it can be all of all of the things, right? Kennel cough, right, which has many causes, viruses, bacteria, several that we know about out there, some of which we test for, and some of which we don't routinely test for. But honestly, this is the most common infection, respiratory infection that we see in dogs. So most of the time when they come in, this is an uncomplicated infection. We're seeing exactly what we expect to see and we know how this is going to typically resolve. We don't test for that. So we don't test to see what specific bacteria or viruses is active here because we know the treatment is the same for all of these conditions. It's very similar to people, right? When we go to the doctor, um, they don't typically do a whole panel of tests to find out what viruses or cold, right? They might test for flu or something, but we typically are not like running a panel to see what's going on. And that's, that's exactly what, um, we as veterinarians do. Now we may run that then if we have something that's outside of the ordinary, what we expect, or if they're not resolving, they're not getting better with time or specific treatment. The other issue is people are people say a lot like this is a new thing because we're not finding it on the tests that we're running. So a small percentage of the what are presumed to be cases are being tested. There's a lot of reasons why we might not find it. One, we don't test for everything. that can be causing these signs. Sometimes some of those tests aren't very good tests. They're not as reliable. They're still the best we have, but they're not as reliable with what information they give us. Um, also, when are we testing? If we test very early in the infection, we're more likely to find what the cause is. But when we test later in the infection, even a week or more later, we may not We may not get a positive test because what started it isn't there anymore, and the body is just responding to the damage or maybe there's another pathogen there that's come in secondarily and we may find it and then presume that it started at all. So there's, there's a lot of, a lot of challenges with testing it's not as simple as like, Oh, tell us what it is.

Yeah, this is I mean, it's the same in everything that we do, right? Like even like stool samples, whether it be toxicology, it doesn't matter what it is. If we don't know what we're looking for, it makes it that much harder to find it. Right. There have been some people that because of COVID are wondering if this could be COVID and how likely are dogs to get COVID. So what are your thoughts on that?

So that's a great question. And they have tested the cases that get tested for COVID and they haven't found it. We do know that dogs can become infected, but it's pretty uncommon, um, and typically not causing issues with the dogs at all.

If an owner has, you know, a pet owner has a dog that is coughing and that has some nasal discharge that is perhaps acting a little bit lethargic, off food, what can they do if they suspect that their pet may be sick with this respiratory complex?

Well, I think the first thing is to call your veterinarian, let them know what your concerns are and get an appointment so that your dog can be evaluated. They'll be able to do an examination and assess what they think this is. Is it viral? Is it bacterial? And then treat according to that. I think it's important for people to realize because another thing that I hear frequently with this outbreak is that it's not responding to normal treatments. Um, and I think that's, really the fact that viruses don't respond to antibiotics. Viruses don't ever respond to antibiotics. So that's doesn't mean that this illness is, you know, any different than any of the other viruses that we're dealing with. And I think that's a really important thing to understand. There are treatments that we can do. Basically, we provide comfort and support, make sure that they're getting enough to drink and eat, and occasionally cough suppressants or anti inflammatories, just like we would take if we had a virus, right? We're not treating that virus. We are treating the body's response to the virus. So I think that's really important to understand, but so the veterinarian will, you know, examine and decide are antibiotics warranted in this situation or not, or do we need to do other other types of care and then monitor. And that's really important. How are we responding for getting worse and worse than maybe bacteria have come in secondarily and now antibiotics are warranted so things can change over the course of an illness that might might mean that we need to alter our treatment and response.

What can owners do proactively to protect their pets?

I think one of the most important things is to make sure that they're current on their vaccines. Um, and some of those vaccines are going to vary based on what kind of activity you have around other, other dogs, right? So if you're boarding, if you're going to dog parks or dog shows or things like that, you may definitely want to have Bordetella and parainfluenza, which are common causes of kennel cough or respiratory disease complex. I think that's the most important thing is to make sure your pets are current. Is it going to protect them against everything? No, but it is going to protect them against the most common causes of respiratory disease.

I think it also may, even if they get it, it may not make them as sick. Would that be a fair assumption to make?

Um, yeah, for some of those vaccine preventable diseases, absolutely. Even if it doesn't prevent it, it will reduce the severity and reduce the duration, for sure.

Should this be affecting Holiday travel plans. So should people just change their plans all of a sudden, like not board? Or what can they do to ensure that the facilities that they're boarding their animals are going to be as safe as possible?

That's a great question. I think if if you're in an area that's not reporting a lot of cases of respiratory disease, I don't think we need to make any changes at all. And what we're doing, including here in Ohio, which we're not reporting any any cases right now. So if you're looking for a boarding facility, again, you don't need to avoid them, especially if there's no, you know, cases being reported in your area of respiratory disease, not just a mystery disease, but of canine respiratory disease. But talk with your boarding kennel, find out how the animals are housed. Do they have an isolation area where they take animals if they do become sick during the, um, their stay there? And what do they do if that happens? Are they contacting veterinarians and follow in the owners and then following up? So I think those are really important things to know. Make sure that your dog is vaccinated, but make sure that the boarding kennel requires vaccination for all of their dogs.

I think something actually that you just said made me think of, you know, it, that if an animal gets sick, it gets isolated. I think it's something that people don't think about when they are leaving their animals boarding is leaving an emergency contact, leaving veterinarian information and leaving permission to treat if they cannot be reached. Because I know when I was working in an emergency, we would get animals brought in by either a boarding facility or the person that was pet sitting or a family member, and we would say, hey, these are our recommendations, this is what needs to happen, and they would say, well, we can't make that decision because we're not the owner, and then we couldn't get a hold of the owner. So if you're traveling and you're leaving your pets behind to leave everything in writing as far as what can be done, what cannot be done, leaving some form of like financial, like whether it be money, a credit card, some information for whoever is taking care of the pet to be able to seek medical assistance if needed.

That is really great advice. Really great advice.

So what can veterinarians do if they suspect a patient has this problem?

I believe veterinarians are always very diligent in their exams and assessing what's going on and what treatments need to occur. I don't see the treatments as really different from how we treat respiratory disease complex or kennel cough and in other cases. I think the only thing that I would do differently right now is be more likely to send out testing. And I think that would help us a lot. I know there was a shelter in California that had an outbreak of respiratory disease in their dogs, and everybody was like, Oh, no, it's this new mystery disease. And it ended up being strep zoo and mycoplasma, which are pathogens bacterial that we're quite familiar with. Unfortunately, we don't like to see them in shelters. But, you know, there are often common causes that are going to explain this. And I think that's what we really need to do is And start looking at these a little bit more closely. Is this something we're familiar with? Are we not finding, um, an answer? In which case, you know, send it off to the National Diagnostic Labs for additional testing.

And these are respiratory panels that are readily available already, right? It's not something new.

Yeah. So the, yeah, the basic testing that we do is, is readily available for veterinarians and can send client samples out, and it's a pretty quick turnaround too. So usually within a couple of days, you're going to know what the results of those tests are. I do think it's important to note that there are more things that cause respiratory disease in dogs that we, um, we don't test for everything. So if we don't find an answer, it just means that it wasn't the ones that we tested for. There are several things that we know about. They're just not common enough, or we don't have a test developed for it that's just readily commercially available.

We work with a lot of shelters, and some of our shelter partners are just freaking out over this. So they don't want to, they want to close intakes, they don't want to do any spay neuter with dogs, they don't want to do anything because they're just concerned that this thing is just going to wipe out all the animals at the shelter, and then it's going to get the whole community sick. How, how likely is that? What should shelters be doing, and should they be, I mean, should they be changing their practices?

Yeah, so that's a, that's a great question. Shelters are ever vigilant for infectious disease, right? Because we are housing animals in group settings, not necessarily all together in one room, but there's a lot of animals in the same building sharing the same airspace. And so disease can transfer pretty readily. So we're ever vigilant for that. And I think that we just need to maintain that. If we're in areas where we're not seeing an outbreak. I don't think you need to change what you're doing at all. We should be monitoring daily more than once daily to check every animal for potential signs when we see signs of potentially infectious disease that's contagious, we need to move them into an isolation area so that the other rest of the population is protected from that. They're not going to be exposed as heavily as they would be if that dog was coughing right next to them. So the same basic disease control measures that we take. Vaccination on intake, monitoring for disease, isolation of sick animals. That's what we need to do. And if we have something come up, especially something that looks a little bit unusual, we need to test for that to see what we have going on. If you're a shelter and you're in the middle of a community that's experiencing an outbreak like this, right, you need to be, um, do the same things, but maybe even more vigilantly. So they may decide that incoming animals need to go in a specific area. And kind of cohort groups through the shelter so that we can reduce the exposures. But other than that, it's the same, right? Cleaning and disinfection, monitoring, isolation, vaccination, and just be vigilant.

So I know that there is a great resource that shelters can be using, right? A guide that can help them along, among all this stuff. Do you want to let shelters know about how they can get more information on how to take care of their shelters better?

Yeah, so the Association of Shelter Veterinarians has guidelines for standards of care and animal shelters. It's quite a mouthful, but it provides guidance for shelters in all areas of managing the health and welfare of the animals in their care. Really recommend that every shelter download that it's a free download from sheltervet. org. There's a lot of really good information guidelines to help develop protocols for these kinds of things. And then the other thing that it does is provide resources with much more detailed information in textbooks and a variety of university websites where more details can be found on these issues.

I'll make sure to share the, the link to the guidelines on the episode information because I think that there's a lot of shelters and especially rescue groups, smaller rescue groups, that they don't see themselves as a shelter, but they still have high population. So it may help them as well.

There's one more thing that I think shelters should be really, really aware of and working very hard to, um, to address this issue because it's really common in shelters. We need to avoid overcrowding. When we have more animals. Um, then our shelter should be holding and that's whether you're counting cages, you also need to be looking at the staffing levels. There's a lot of things that go into the what's your capacity for care. But when you're at near or over your capacity for care disease outbreaks are much more likely. And so one of the best disease control measures we have is to make sure that we're not overcrowded.

Yeah, and we are seeing that, you know, as the pet overpopulation is increasing and shelters are becoming overcrowded, those are some of the things that we need to really consider, just because we're, we're saving them, or we think that we're saving them, but if we could be making them sick and having them suffer needlessly. Ohio State has not seen any cases through the community clinic or the emergency clinic. Is that right?

Yeah, that's right. I've talked with our, um, our frontline staff and our ER doctors and they haven't seen any cases that they thought were unusual or, unidentifiable.

Excellent. Well, I think that this has been really great information, and I'm hoping that people have learned about it, you know, it's not saying, no, there is no risk that your pet can't get sick, but it's understanding that this mysterious illness may not be that mysterious after all, and just because we hear about some animals getting sick and animals dying, you know, like the cases in Oregon, it's like 200 animals were sick. Well, do you know how many animals, how many dogs there are in Oregon? Way more than 200, right? So percentage wise, We think that it's a huge number, but it's not, it's a small percentage compared to all the dogs that, that are in the state. So, we need to be cautious, we need to protect our pets, we need to vaccinate, shelters need to, uh, do proper practices, but in the end, we just gotta make sure that we're not scaring everybody and that we're not getting scared into paralysis.

Right. Absolutely. If, if this is something new and there's a small chance that it is, if it's something new, it presents and is managed exactly the same as a dozen plus other viruses and bacteria that we're already familiar with. So I think the veterinarians are well prepared to handle this.

Well, thank you so much, Dr. O'quin for being here and sharing your wealth of information and for everybody that's out there. Thank you for listening and thank you for caring.

Thanks so much.