I know it’s Christmas and this is an odd topic but something just occurred to me: why don’t the dogs catch cold more often?
Knock wood, it’s surprising how few dog-to-dog communicable diseases I’ve come across. Really, in 3 some years, I’ve only seen kennel cough, twice. My kids have been infected by an almost non-stop series of minor colds and a couple of cases of influenza in the same amount of time.
Oh, I should say, I work with dogs (glencadia.com).
And my experience with kennel cough was this: in one case, the vaccine might have been almost completely ineffective, and perhaps slightly effective in the other case. More on that later.
Like kids at school, here at dog camp there are a large number of creatures of the same species in a defined space for an extended period of time. And as in school, in the winter the windows are closed. Between sharing water buckets and dog social habits, which can involve contact between the bodily fluids of different animals, disease, you might think, should be more common than it has been (knock wood).
I have to think that the reason that dog-to-dog disease is more rare than human-to-human infection (assuming that my perception is true) is simply do to travel patterns in the population: dogs do not in general travel locally (work, school) and internationally (one plane flight per lifetime is already a lot for a dog) as much as humans and therefore diseases cannot establish themselves as easily in a population and local problems don’t spread, you don’t have new varieties of old diseases as often, etc.
Even New York City dogs, who are probably the most likely to interact in significant ways with other dogs (and to come from other parts of the world), do not have as much intimate contact with other dogs as the average child. Most dogs in American probably have sustained contact with another dog from another home no more than a few times per week at most. And from week to week, they see the same few dogs over and over again.
In New York, it might be 10 times as much, or 100 times as much, and still be fewer individuals for shorter periods of time than a child who sits in a room with 25 other children with the windows closed for 6 hours, 5 days a week. And the more social New York dogs are protected by the more isolated conditions of the other 99% of the dogs in the area.
Like dogs, children, of course, do more than breathe on each other. Feces transmit polio: one person’s feces has to find its way into another person’s mouth. Yet, as we know, it spread rather widely, through food preparation and children doing things like touching toys with dirty hands, toys later handled by another child, who put his or her hands in the mouth, or some other similar scenarios.
If humans can spread a disease widely through feces, imagine what dogs could do.
I have a friend from Nigeria who, as a child, had a pack of dogs in the family compound for security and companionship. All 14 died in the course of about 2 weeks from an unknown disease. He was a child and wasn’t sure if some were not put to sleep to prevent further spreading or for other reasons but he thinks not.
This was a single incident which, as he recalls, surprised everyone and never happened again, or before, as far as anyone could recall.
A disease, if it exists as reported, which can spread from animal to animal and kill every individual in a short amount time is unparalleled in human experience. Even Ebola is not 100% lethal. Small pox, at it’s worst, killed less than a third of those exposed. The influenza of 1918 killed less than 5% of those infected.
For humans, the experience of AIDS has put us on alert for new diseases. We have an infrastructure to find and report any such disease, even if the infrastructure isn’t perfect. It obviously makes sense to be on the look out. It obviously makes sense for someone, such as the CDC, to track new strains of old diseases and update vaccine.
How about other animals? I’m sure the livestock industry takes care of this issue. How about dogs? While we love our dogs one at a time, we don’t have any system, as far as I know, to track strains and new diseases. I could be wrong of course.
Anything spent on dogs or other luxury animals would seem a waste in a world where so many humans lack access to medical care. But we shouldn’t actually link those two issues – humans versus animals – so much as the cost of building a new disease and new strain tracking system versus the cost of doing nothing.
If spending no money on animal health were an option, then not establishing a system to look for new strains and diseases, update vaccines and send out alerts for people working with dogs could make sense. If no money were going to be spent on dogs, then could use any available funds for human health.
But since money will in fact be spent on animal health whether we track new diseases or not, it is probably cheaper in the long run to set up a system to track new cases. And it might not be particularly expensive. The question is not whether to spend money on animal health or not, since money will be spent. The question is will a lot of money be spent ineffectively by individuals without anyone tracking the most effective strategies or will a small amount of money be spent in advance to set up a national, central system that will gather information.
I know I argued that dogs do not socialize as much as humans so they are less vulnerable. But if I am right about kennel cough, that there are new strains that are not included in the vaccine, that some might be more resistant to antibiotics, etc., then there may in fact be more dog-to-dog disease problems than in the past. If some bad diseases may exist out there, and they may, I really can't see the harm in looking for them.
If every dog in American were required to have a national license at the cost of $3 every 3 years (make it a long time to save on administration) we could have the equivalent of a CDC for pets, which might only need a staff of a half dozen people, and still have 80 million dollars left over to spend on malaria eradication in Africa or other worthy human health issues. The license would be mandatory, paid on federal taxes, but there would be no enforcement. Heck, just two people and a website might be enough to prevent a new disease.
Just an idea. I actually don't know.