CHICAGO, ILL (WSAU) – Avian flu is affecting millions of chickens and turkeys, but there’s a relatively new flu affecting dogs that’s hitting some parts of America hard.
Dr. Douglas Aspros is a veterinarian, and the former President of American Veterinary Medical Association. He says one form of canine flu has been around for just over a decade. “In 2004, starting with greyhounds, racing greyhounds in Florida, and cases in the New York metro area, a significant number of dogs got sick with influenza and died, and it was a disease that we had not seen anywhere before.”
Aspros says there is another canine flu strain that probably traveled with a dog from southeast Asia, and has been devastating in the Chicago area. “We started to see a couple of thousand cases in the Chicago area of a new flu, not the strain that we were seeing over the past ten years, but a new flu, one that was seen before in south China and into Korea, but not in the U.S. before.”
Many dogs die from this strain of flu.
Aspros says there is a vaccine for the older flu strain, but they’re not sure if it works on the new flu problem. “What we don’t know is whether that vaccine is protective at all for the new strain of flu, because although there’s some relationship, they’re clearly not the same disease, have different markers, and it’s just too new for us to know whether or not the existing vaccine is going to be protective in any way.”
