Dog Flu

The Flu pandemic has put the world in fear  for a few months now. How many flu’s do we have globetrotting right now? Avian Flu, Swine flu, bird flu;  Way to many to keep up with. People are speculating that swine flu was created in some lab and released on the public as a way of population control and profit through the introduction of anti-viral drugs.

Worse things have happened in america’s war on the world , but now it seems it’s not enough to just inflict psuedo plagues on man, their trying to take out man’s best friend too. A story ran in the New York Times about a new strain of flu that has been hitting our k-9 counter parts hard. But no need to fear, just like Big Pharma has a solution to all our viral needs, they also have them for your little dog too.

While fears of a flu pandemic among humans have shifted from the lethal H5N1 avian flu to the relatively mild H1N1swine flu, the H3N8 canine flu has been a quiet undercurrent in the United States, rarely discussed except among veterinarians and dog owners in the few areas where it has struck hard: Florida, New York City’s northern suburbs, Philadelphia and Denver.

“I don’t think we know what this virus is going to do yet,” said one of its discoverers, Dr. Cynda Crawford of the University of Florida veterinary school.

When Dr. Crawford began studying it in January 2004, it had come to her notice as a mysterious cough and pneumonia that killed a third of the greyhounds at a Florida dog track. By the next year, she had found it in seven states and had shown that it could be passed by dogs who just rubbed noses on the street or shared a water dish, and that humans could carry it on their clothes. There was a brief flurry of fear that it would kill 1 percent to 10 percent of the country’s 70 million dogs.

“Probably over 10,000 dogs have been infected,” Dr. Crawford said, “but I can’t say whether it’s 20,000 or 30,000. In a population of 70 million, that’s a drop in the bucket.”