Veterinarians say fears about 'mystery' dog illness may be overblown. Here's why
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Is there a dog pandemic? There are reports about respiratory illnesses in dogs, although some veterinarians say there is no reason to panic. NPR's Will Stone reports.
WILL STONE, BYLINE: About two months ago, Dr. Melissa Beyer noticed something unusual. Some of the dogs coming into her clinic, South Des Moines Veterinary Center, were sick. They had a hacking cough. She tried to treat them for a respiratory illness as she normally would, but it didn't seem to be helping.
MELISSA BEYER: So that was kind of the red flag that something's going on here that was different. And since then, we've just seen more and more of those.
STONE: She would run the standard tests that search for common bugs that make dogs sick, and they would come back negative.
BEYER: Fortunately for us, kind of across the board, we don't have a lot of fatalities from it. It's just that they're taking longer to respond.
STONE: Reports of a similar illness have emerged all over the country, starting last year when cases popped up in New Hampshire, then this summer, more hot spots in New England - next Oregon, Colorado. And now the list seems to grow by the day. The headlines and online chatter about a mysterious illness have alarmed many dog owners. But Dr. Jane Sykes says, hold on a minute.
JANE SYKES: This, to me, is not anything super new. And I do worry that it's been blown up, potentially, through social media circulation.
STONE: Sykes studies infectious diseases at UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.
SYKES: It's entirely possible that there is just a ton of different bugs and viruses that are causing disease in different parts of the country.
STONE: Sykes says just because tests come back negative doesn't mean the dog has a never-seen-before disease. The samples can be too small or taken too late.
SYKES: There's lots of reasons why you can get negative results. And in fact, for some of these organisms, negative results are even more common than positive test results.
STONE: She says it's possible dogs are getting infected with several bugs all at once, making the illness drag on. Dr. Silene St. Bernard is with VCA, which runs more than a thousand animal hospitals in the U.S. and Canada.
SILENE ST BERNARD: What we don't have at this point is anything that would indicate there's a national outbreak, anything that would indicate these are all medically connected to each other.
STONE: She says it's normal to see a seasonal uptick in respiratory cases as people travel and board their dogs. Dr. Scott Weese studies infectious diseases at the Ontario Veterinary College.
SCOTT WEESE: With respiratory disease in dogs, we always see it waxing and waning. We'll see some places get a cluster of disease, rates go up for a little while.
STONE: He says in the last few years, there does seem to be longer and larger regional outbreaks. Any number of bugs, like influenza, could be involved.
WEESE: We're looking, we're paying attention. There might be something new. We're far from saying there's something new.
STONE: One intriguing bit of evidence comes from researchers in New Hampshire. Through genetic sequencing, they found what looks like a new bacterium in some dogs that were sick. But Weese says it's not clear that's actually the cause.
WEESE: We've seen this before. We find something and say, hey, that's new, it must be a big problem. Then we realize every dog's got it.
STONE: In Oregon, Dr. Kurt Williams thinks something different may be happening to dogs in his state. Williams runs the Oregon Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, where he's finding bleeding and acute injury in the small air sacs in the lungs.
KURT WILLIAMS: I don't want to get out over my skis here, but I've looked at a lot of dog lungs in my career and these are a little bit different. And so it makes me think maybe there is something out there. Doesn't mean we need to lose our minds.
STONE: He knows this uncertainty is hard for dog owners to stomach.
WILLIAMS: I totally understand it. And yet I think we need to be patient and trust the process.
STONE: It may be out of sight, but he says that process, this painstaking detective work, will eventually pay off.
Will Stone, NPR News.
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