The pet insurance company Trupanion hosted a virtual Q&A on November 30 featuring a panel of veterinarians who fielded questions and offered their insights into CIRDC. The panelists included CSU professor Dr. Michael Lappin. Colorado, New Hampshire, and Oregon officials are working with state and federal veterinary diagnostic laboratories to determine the underlying cause or causes.
Colorado State University researchers are investigating whether a contagious illness that has led to a spike in the number of upper respiratory infections in canines along Colorado’s Front Range is due to a new pathogen or an organism that is already known and recognized as a cause of respiratory disease in dogs.
“This virus is very easy to transmit, so the outbreak has been really, really challenging. We can’t remove the virus from wild birds, so there’s always a risk for spillover of the virus to commercial and backyard poultry and occasionally to mammals." -Dr. Kristy Pablionia
LISTEN: Host Ira Flatow talks with Dr. Kristy Pabilonia, professor and director of the Veterinary Diagnostics Laboratories at Colorado State University.
The Colorado Department of Agriculture’s State Veterinarians Office was notified on March 28, 2023 that a horse residing in Garfield County had tested presumptive positive for Equine Infectious Anemia. The initial test was completed at Colorado State University’s Western Slope Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory with the confirmatory test completed at the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, on April 4, 2023.
When asked what memories stick out the most from his five decades working at Colorado State University, Dr. Terry Spraker lists discovering the first case of chronic wasting disease in an elk, working with a young pathologist named Tony Frank and the burning of Old Main in 1970.
Graffit's body was taken in a procession from the scene of his death to Fort Collins late Monday morning. A necropsy will be performed on the animal's body at the Colorado State University's veterinary center.
VIDEO: "It's concerning because not all avian influenza viruses cause this level of mortality in birds. There are a lot of avian influenza viruses that birds can live with, and they’re not getting sick and dying. So this is just a particularly pathogenic virus in wild and domestic birds and that is very concerning, and the ability of the virus to transmit directly from birds to mammals is [also] concerning." -Dr. Kristy Pabilonia
"We've been testing for [avian influenza] about a year now. And the volume goes up and down. Sometimes we can see up to 100-200 samples in a day. Sometimes even more than that, and sometimes we see just a handful of samples in a day." -Dr. Kristy Pabilonia
Records from Vesta's necropsy with Colorado State University's Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratories showed the bird tested positive for the avian influenza H5 subtype, which has been found in birds all across the country.