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Tracking Companion Animal Disease

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Pets get ill. Sometimes, outbreaks of pet illnesses occur—but there is no Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for pet diseases. Owners decide whether to get their pets tested, and in most countries, there is no mechanism for veterinarians to formally notify one another nor a state body that tracks disease trends.   Moreover, surveillance of pets for new viruses or new variants is not routine. Veterinary scientists in the UK and the US are trying to change that with twin initiatives aimed at monitoring pet populations for outbreaks. Their aim is to alert vets about new microbial threats to animals, but some infectious disease researchers say such monitoring might one day also serve as early warning systems, detecting pathogens that threaten to spill over into people.  For many virologists, this fills a clear gap. “There is not a country on the planet that I’m aware of that has a national surveillance system for [general] cat and dog diseases. I think that’s a blind spot,” says Alan Radford, a veterinary virologist at the University of Liverpool. In the UK, unlike with human patients, there’s no public funding for diagnostic tests of pets, and little money or incentive to collect data that would provide a nationwide picture of pet diseases or health status. “There is no Public Health England for dogs,” quips Radford. “So that generally for companion animals, that ability to have a national view of disease is not present.”  Currently, says virologist Gerald Barry at University College Dublin, Ireland, vets often swap information informally, such as by contacting colleagues or posting on social media if they see something unusual. This can alert vets to, for example, test for a specific microbe or fine-tune their prescribing practices.    But it is difficult to separate the coincidental from a trend without proper monitoring records. Radford with colleagues addressed that need in 2008 by setting up arguably the first surveillance network for small animals: the Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network (SAVSNET). This collects data from vets and from commercial diagnostic labs from across the UK for the purposes of research and surveillance. It has been a slow process to set up the network, with no obvious funding bodies to turn to. “It has taken us a lot of hard work to get us to where we are today,” says Radford.    The dream: real-time forecasting of outbreaks The network proved its worth following a phone call Radford received from vet Danielle Greenberg, who thought she was seeing more cases than usual of severe vomiting in dogs in the Liverpool area in January 2020. She wanted to know if this was a true outbreak and if other people were seeing it.    SAVSNET analyzed data it had collected from across the UK and found an uptick in gastroenteric disease among dogs—not just in the northwest, but across most of the country. “It was essentially twice the normal level,” says Radford, adding that they also saw a substantial increase in prescribing of drugs used to treat vomiting.    Further statistical analysis confirmed that this was unusual, matching the definition of an outbreak. The SAVSNET team made its findings public in a report in the CDC’s Emerging Infectious Diseases  in February 2021. This revealed that the vomiting outbreak was significantly associated with a canine enteric coronavirus and seemed especially severe around the cities of Edinburgh, Guilford, Swansea, Bristol, and Manchester. Radford and his colleagues set up a website to post live information and advice to vets, to help them manage and isolate cases and to communicate such issues to owners.     Jennifer Granick (right) with a veterinary student and a patient STEVE WOIT Nearly all the dogs that tested positive for canine enteric coronavirus had a single variant, Radford explains, so the suspicion is that a new variant arose or arrived in the UK and rapidly spread through the dog population. Whether the same virus rippled through other coun...