"Jack "The Unpalatable Barbarian" Morrison"
wrote in message
...
Okay, one more time.

Has anyone here actually observed this "illness," or do you know
anyone who actually has?

Your question made me curious. I've posed it to a schnauzer group that
includes a lot of active breed people. Seems like if it's spreading like
wildfire that it would have started to affect breed shows by now. So many
dogs in such close quarters. And many of them coming from kennel
situations.

Will let you know.

~~Judy

Judy wrote:

Your question made me curious.

I only know of one confirmed case. Someone on the Dane board had 3 of
her 4 dogs get sick. One shrugged it off, two got pretty sick, and one
of them (a puppy, IIRC) died. The poster was from Cleveland. A few
more people have reported having sick dogs with similar symptoms, and a
couple of those dogs have died, but since none of them had any bloodwork
sent to Cornell, what exactly these dogs died of remains a mystery.

When I was at the vet's a couple of weeks ago, I asked her whether they
have seen any, and she said that so far, they have had one confirmed case.

Suja

Jack "The Unpalatable Barbarian" Morrison wrote:

Suja, I'd be interested in hearing exactly *how* they confirmed it.

Both with the Dane person and the vet, they sent bloodwork to Cornell.
I'm not sure what exactly Cornell does to confirm the presence of the virus.

Suja

"Jack "The Unpalatable Barbarian" Morrison"
wrote in message
...
Also, Judy, I refuse to believe that a virus that supposedly
originated in birds (producing the "avian flu") can jump a species to
the horse (producing the "equine flu", and then jump another species,
to the dog (producing the "dog flu"), all in a matter of months.

Actually, the snopes article was the first time I heard about it mutating
from the avian flu, via horses or otherwise.

~~Judy

Jack "The Unpalatable Barbarian" Morrison wrote:

If anyone knows (or can find out) how Cornell confirms this virus, I'd
be very interested in hearing more about it.

This is the information Cornell has on their site:
http://www.diaglab.vet.cornell.edu/issues/civ-dect.asp The Statistics
page is for the results of Hemagglutination Inhibition Tests.

Suja

In article ,
Judy wrote:
Actually, the snopes article was the first time I heard about it mutating
from the avian flu, via horses or otherwise.

I've never heard that either, and I've talked to both my
regular practice vets and folks at Cornell about it.

Anyway, with regard to mutation, before deciding whether or
not it's possible I'd first want to know how many
generations we're talking about rather than time period, and
what the usual rate of mutations is. But as I said, none of
the vets I've talked to has claimed that it's a mutation
from avian flu.

Either way, I figure it's not a big deal to keep an eye on
my dogs as usual, and if one or more starts coughing to pay
a visit to the vet. My feeling is that since my guys tend
not to be exposed to non-sleddogs, dogs from Florida, or
dogs that are kennelled, it's not something that I need to
be actively worried about. They're going to be around a lot
of other dogs this winter but dogsledding is an inherently
insular activity.
--
Melinda Shore - Software longa, hardware brevis -

Prouder than ever to be a member of the reality-based community.

Suja wrote:
Judy wrote:

Your question made me curious.

I only know of one confirmed case. Someone on the Dane board had 3 of
her 4 dogs get sick. One shrugged it off, two got pretty sick, and one
of them (a puppy, IIRC) died. The poster was from Cleveland. A few
more people have reported having sick dogs with similar symptoms, and a
couple of those dogs have died, but since none of them had any bloodwork
sent to Cornell, what exactly these dogs died of remains a mystery.

When I was at the vet's a couple of weeks ago, I asked her whether they
have seen any, and she said that so far, they have had one confirmed case.

Suja

I got an email forward at work today from the owner of the kennel I
work at saying that there have been no new cases reported in the states
that this flu has been reported in since they were all reported. FWIW.

"Jack "The Unpalatable Barbarian" Morrison" wrote:

"The diagnosis of a canine influenza infection at this time is most

reliably done by detecting antibodies to the virus."



This worries me greatly, and enforces by belief that this is all a

bunch of hogwash.

They do say that diagnosis requires HI tests performed with paired sera,

from infected and convalescent dogs, checking for a titer differential.

They specifically state that without the titer differential, all they can

state is whether the dog has had past exposure to the pathogen or not.

Let's not forget, the presence of antibodies against a pathogen infers

that your immune system is working as planned, and has fought off (or

is fighting off) the invader.

And one must not confuse the presence of antibodies with whether the body is

*successfully* defending itself against the antigenic organism. A body's

immune response may or may not be adequate.

Correlation does not (and should not) imply causation.

No, but when 20 dogs get sick, and all 20 test positive for the presence of

an antibody against a particular pathogen, the likelihood that something

else is making them sick goes down substantially.

What we probably have here is an epidemic of testing, not of a new

flu. A pneumonia of some kind is probably the actual culprit.

The virus has been isolated, and shown to be the closest, genetically

speaking, to an equine virus (Transmission of equine influenza virus to

dogs. Crawford PC, Dubovi EJ, Castleman WL, Stephenson I, Gibbs EP, Chen L,

Smith C, Hill RC, Ferro P, Pompey J, Bright RA, Medina MJ, Johnson CM, Olsen

CW, Cox NJ, Klimov AI, Katz JM, Donis RO. Science. 2005 Oct

21;310(5747):482-5. Epub 2005 Sep 26. -

http://www.vetmed.ufl.edu/pr/nw_story/1117950v1.pdf)

I believe that both the equine and the canine viruses have been sequenced,

although the canine one might only be partial at this point.

Whether a new canine flu or pneumonia (which they say it leads to) is the

actual culprit, fact remains that a whole bunch of dogs are getting sick,

showing the same sort of symptoms, and some (admittedly, a small percentage)

are dying from it. Currently, there is no special treatment protocol for

it, and no vaccine for it, although there is evidence to suggest that the

virus has been around since 2000, and the first major outbreak happened in

January of 2004.

Suja

In article 1U4cf.5982$0l5.3817@dukeread06, Suja wrote:
They do say that diagnosis requires HI tests performed with paired sera,
from infected and convalescent dogs, checking for a titer differential.
They specifically state that without the titer differential, all they can
state is whether the dog has had past exposure to the pathogen or not.

I'm sorry, but Knowing Stuff makes you a member of the
Elite. Having exposed yourself as a member of the Elite, we
now know that we must mock you before burning you at the
stake. If we don't, we hate America.

Michael Shedlock (an economics researcher in the investment
industry and an excellent source if you're a fundamentals
investor) has a good summary of where we stand with science
education in the US, which I think has some rather direct
bearing on how we deal with things like news about disease
outbreaks, etc.:
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogsp...ation-gap.html

BTW, Outlook (or whatever) inserted a blank line between
each line of text in your post. It made the post visually
difficult to read, although it was an excellent post.
--
Melinda Shore - Software longa, hardware brevis -

Prouder than ever to be a member of the reality-based community.

In article uu5cf.5983$0l5.1513@dukeread06, Suja wrote:
Odd, how it inserted spaces where
there shouldn't be any, and took them away from where there should be some.

The network equipment behemoth recently moved us all to
Exchange for email, and I'm using Entourage from my Mac.
I recently discovered that Entourage is silently and
inexplicably dumping unread email on several company mailing
lists directly into my trash folder. I couldn't find any
reason on either my Mac or in the server settings for it so
I created a rule to move unread mail from those mailing
lists into my Inbox, but even though I specified it should
move them into my Exchange inbox it moves them into a local
Inbox. If I could move to another client I would, but there
are some complications around calendaring (which Exchange
integrates with email) that make that impossible. Which is
all a long way of saying that Microsoft software is for
experimentalists.
--
Melinda Shore - Software longa, hardware brevis -

Prouder than ever to be a member of the reality-based community.