Spain kills Ebola victim's dog

[seasidemike]

I love animals and dogs, but I don't get this myself. There are over 8,000 cases of ebola and over 4,000 deaths so far and it is growing at an alarming rate to the point where this is the worst outbreak ever, yet people freak out over having to put the dog down.

http://rt.com/news/194300-spain-ebola-dog-slaughtered/

 

[+paradox]

i love animals too, but i have to agree that the action was correct...

 

[DrLeftover]

Oh, wow, Damn.

I find myself agreeing with J. (I'll try not to let it happen again)

And for one reason.

Of all the pages of Ebola symptoms on medical sites I can find... there's nothing about the symptoms in dogs, except that it may possibly be transmitted by various animals.

When news broke that the Ebola virus had resurfaced in Uganda, investigators in Canada were making headlines of their own with research indicating the deadly virus may spread between species, through the air.

The team, comprised of researchers from the National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease, the University of Manitoba, and the Public Health Agency of Canada, observed transmission of Ebola from pigs to monkeys. They first inoculated a number of piglets with the Zaire strain of the Ebola virus. Ebola-Zaire is the deadliest strain, with mortality rates up to 90 percent. The piglets were then placed in a room with four cynomolgus macaques, a species of monkey commonly used in laboratories. The animals were separated by wire cages to prevent direct contact between the species.

http://healthmap.org/site/diseasedaily/article/pigs-monkeys-ebola-goes-airborne-112112

INFECTIOUS AGENT

Viral hemorrhagic fevers (VHFs) are caused by several families of enveloped RNA viruses: filoviruses (Ebola and Marburg viruses), arenaviruses (Lassa fever, Lujo, Guanarito, Machupo, Junin, Sabia, and Chapare viruses), bunyaviruses (Rift Valley fever [RVF], Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever [CCHF], and hantaviruses), and flaviviruses (dengue, yellow fever, Omsk hemorrhagic fever, Kyasanur Forest disease, and Alkhurma viruses); see the Dengue and Yellow Fever sections in this chapter.
TRANSMISSION

Some VHFs are spread person to person through direct contact with symptomatic patients, body fluids, or cadavers or through inadequate infection control in a hospital setting (filoviruses, arenaviruses, CCHF virus). Zoonotic spread may occur from contact with the following:

Livestock via slaughter or consumption of raw meat from infected animals and, potentially, unpasteurized milk (CCHF, RVF, Alkhurma viruses)
Bushmeat, likely via slaughter or consumption of infected animals (Ebola, Marburg viruses)
Rodents via inhalation of or contact with materials contaminated with rodent excreta (arenaviruses, hantaviruses)
Other reservoir species, such as bats (Ebola, Marburg viruses)

Vectorborne transmission also occurs via mosquito (RVF virus) or tick (CCHF, Omsk, Kyasanur Forest disease, Alkhurma viruses) bites or by crushing infected ticks.

http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/yellowbook/2014/chapter-3-infectious-diseases-related-to-travel/viral-hemorrhagic-fevers

 

[Jazzy]

Protests As Ebola Victim's Dog Put Down

A US veterinary health expert criticised the Spanish authorities.

"There's never been any evidence of transmission from dogs to humans," said Dr Peter Cowen, a professor at North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine.

"It's never happened in any sense. So we don't have any scientific information that that dog was a risk."

I disagree that the dog had to be put down.

 

[DrLeftover]

I respectfully disagree Miss Lady.

The key sentence is the last one.

During the 2001–2002 outbreak in Gabon, we
observed that several dogs were highly exposed to Ebola
virus by eating infected dead animals. To examine whether
these animals became infected with Ebola virus, we sam-
pled 439 dogs and screened them by Ebola virus–specific
immunoglobulin (Ig) G assay, antigen detection, and viral
polymerase chain reaction amplification. Seven (8.9%) of
79 samples from the 2 main towns, 15 (15.2%) of 99
samples from Mekambo, and 40 (25.2%) of 159 samples
from villages in the Ebola virus–epidemic area had
detectable Ebola virus–IgG, compared to only 2 (2%) of 102
samples from France. Among dogs from villages with both
infected animal carcasses and human cases, seropreva-
lence was 31.8%. A significant positive direct association
existed between seroprevalence and the distances to the
Ebola virus–epidemic area. This study suggests that dogs
can be infected by Ebola virus and that the putative infec-
tion is asymptomatic.

http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/11/3/pdfs/04-0981.pdf