Dogs are most likely to contract the illness by coming into contact with other dogs at places such as dog parks, kennels and groomers

A mysterious respiratory illness has sickened dogs in several U.S. states and left others dead as veterinarians encourage dog owners to exercise caution and limit contact with other dogs.

According to TODAY, the pneumonia-like illness starts as a cough and gradually worsens, with the illness also being resistant to antibiotics.

In addition to coughing, sneezing, discharge from the eyes or nose, trouble breathing and fatigue have also been observed, according to the Oregon Department of Agriculture. Dogs who exhibit symptoms may also test negative for common causes of respiratory illnesses.

Officials said that dogs are most likely to contract the illness by coming into contact with other dogs, with places such as dog parks, kennels and groomers posing a larger risk.

Dog owners who observe any of the above symptoms are advised to take their dog to a vet immediately.

TODAY reports that veterinarians in the following states are confirmed to have observed cases that match the description of strep zoo:

• Oregon
• Colorado
• New Hampshire
• California
• Indiana
• Illinois
• Washington
• Idaho
• Georgia
• Florida

While vets encourage dog owners to keep their furry friends away from places where other dogs are likely to be, it is stressed that dogs in need of veterinary care are seen as soon as symptoms are shown.

Read more at: nbcchicago.com

Florida accounts for almost one-fifth of nationally reported cases of leprosy, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said.

Leprosy, otherwise known as Hansen’s disease, is one of humanity’s oldest and most stubborn diseases caused by parasitic bacteria.

Mentioned in the Bible’s Old Testament, leprosy has always been rare in the US and can affect the skin and nervous system in often gnarly ways.

A case report last week in the agency’s journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases (EID), has asked people in the Sunshine State to be aware of the risks and doctors to keep it in mind when treating patients.

‘Florida has witnessed an increased incidence of leprosy cases lacking traditional risk factors,’ the report authors said.

‘Those trends, in addition to decreasing diagnoses in foreign-born persons, contribute to rising evidence that leprosy has become endemic in the southeastern United States.’

Health experts aren’t entirely sure what’s driving the increase, given that the cases have no clear evidence of ‘zoonotic exposure’ – caused by germs that spread between animals and people. The bacteria tend to call armadillos home.

There’s also not much pointing to any out-of-the-blue risk factors either.

According to the National Hansen’s Disease Program, 159 new cases of leprosy were reported in the United States in 2020.

Nearly 70% of these cases were recorded in California, Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, New York or Texas.

But Florida stood out especially. Central Florida alone accounted for 81% of cases reported in the state and almost one-fifth of national cases.

Eight cases have been recorded in Florida so far this year, per state health officials.

‘Travel to [Central Florida], even in the absence of other risk factors, should prompt consideration of leprosy in the appropriate clinical context,’ the authors, who aren’t affiliated with the CDC, added.

They called on state physicians to keep an eye on leprosy and report any cases to help assess routes of transmission.

Read more at: www.msn.com

The government is releasing thousands of illegal immigrant children with latent tuberculosis infections into American communities without assurances of treatment.

Nearly 2,500 children with latent infections were released into 44 states over the past year, according to a court-ordered report on how the Health and Human Services Department is treating the children.

About 126,000 total were released, indicating an infection rate of 1 in 50 migrant children.

The government says it can’t treat the children because they are in custody for a short time and treatment requires three to nine months. HHS releases infected children to sponsors and notifies local health authorities in the hope that they can arrange for treatment before the latent infection becomes active.

Those hopes are often dashed.

Local health officials say the notifications are infrequent and the child has often already arrived when they are told about a case in their jurisdiction.

“We do not know how often the sponsors follow through on treatment,” the Virginia Department of Health told The Washington Times in a statement. “By the time outreach takes place, the child has sometimes moved to another area or state.”

Read more at: www.washingtontimes.com

In the year from week ending June 5th 2022 to week ending June 4th 2023 the U.K. recorded 1,059 excess death per million people. The odd thing about this is that excess deaths in the U.K. in 2023 are higher than the excess deaths in the same period in 2020-21 in 13 of the 27 EU nations!

If the people of Austria, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands and Sweden were so worried about the likelihood of dying that they acquiesced in locking themselves up, voluntarily trashed their economies and stopped their kids going to school back in 2020-21 (well, Sweden didn’t, but the rest did), why don’t we feel the need to do the same now? We have more excess deaths now than they had then.

If YouGov did a poll tomorrow asking whether or not we should, right now, go back into lockdown, how many thumbs up would it receive? Very few, I should hope. But if U.K. citizens don’t think it’s a good idea now, why did the Germans or the Finns or the Greeks think it was a good idea in 2020 and 2021? Could it be that they were manipulated? That they weren’t given the whole picture? That they were ‘had’?

Let’s try and put some perspective on this number. We can think of 1,059 excess deaths per 1,000,000 of population in several ways. As a straight percentage let’s round it down to 0.1%. This means that we expect 0.1% of the population to die in addition to the number of people we might ordinarily expect to die in the year. Or, if you prefer, an additional one person in a 1,000 will die in the year.

In the U.K. roughly one person in 100 dies every year, i.e., 1% of the population. But if we’re experiencing excess deaths at a level of 0.1% then we can expect that about 1.1% of the population will die this year. Let’s take the example of a large town or small city with 100,000 inhabitants. In a normal year we’d expect 1,000 deaths. With this year’s higher level of excess deaths, the funeral directors would expect to see 1,100 deaths. That’s all very straightforward.

In case you’d forgotten, let’s remind ourselves that the period from April 5th 2020 to April 4th 2021 included the two big spikes in fatality in Spring 2020 and winter 2020-21. It’s also the period that ended before the vaccine rollout was in any way complete. While about 50% of the U.K. population had received one dose of vaccine by then, in the EU the figure was only about 20%. This period was very much the year when we would have expected to see peak ‘all-cause’ pandemic excess deaths in the U.K. and across Europe with very little amelioration from vaccines or prior infection.

Read more at: dailysceptic.org

The first case of C. purpureum infecting a person has doctors warning of a rising tide of fungus spurred by climate change and urbanization.

A man in India is the first human known to be infected by a fungus called Chondrostereum purpureum, a pathogen that is most well-known for causing a disease called silver leaf in plants, reports a new study.

The patient, who was 61 at the time of the diagnosis, made a full recovery and has not experienced any recurrence of the infection after two years of follow-up observations. However, this “first of its kind” case study exemplifies the risks that fungal pathogens pose for humans, especially now that climate change and other human activities like rampant urbanization, have opened a “Pandora’s Box for newer fungal diseases” by contributing to their spread, according to the study.

Fungal pathogens are having a pop culture moment because they are the source of a fictional disease depicted in apocalyptic game The Last of Us, which was recently adapted into the acclaimed HBO series of the same name. But these microbes are also a real-life scourge that infect about 150 million people every year, resulting in about 1.7 million deaths.

Though millions of fungal species exist, only a very small fraction of them are able to infect animals, including humans, because our bodies present challenges to these invaders such as high temperatures and sophisticated immune systems.

Soma Dutta and Ujjwayini Ray, doctors at Apollo Multispecialty Hospitals in Kolkata, India, have now added one more fungus to that small list of human invaders with their unprecedented report of a C. purpureum infection. The patient, a plant mycologist, had suffered from cough, fatigue, anorexia, and a throat abscess for months before his hospital visit, and was probably exposed to the fungus as a result of his profession.

Read more at: www.vice.com

Pet owners have been urged to look out for a virus that is spiking in some parts of the US and is lethal in dogs.

Parvovirus, often referred to as parvo — a highly-contagious disease that kills up to 90 percent of pooches — is above average levels in at least three parts of the country, New York state, DC and Missouri.

The most common symptoms are vomiting, diarrhea and loss of appetite. The virus is not tracked, so the total number of dogs to have died is not known.

New York health officials released an alert which said the Animal Care Centers (ACC) had diagnosed 14 dogs as of March 14, with the majority in puppies and younger dogs in Bronx and Manhattan facilities.

This far exceeded what is usually seen in a whole year.

And a shelter in Missouri has seen a sharp rise in cases in puppies, with some vets seeing two to three sick parvo-infected dogs every day, and sometimes even five or six. The uptick has been attributed to the warmer weather.

Read more at: www.dailymail.co.uk

Authorities in the UK are set to re-launch a child vaccination campaign in London in response to a polio outbreak in the capital.

British authorities are to re-launch efforts to see every child in London aged from 1 to 11 vaccinated against Polio after an outbreak of the disease last year.

An initial campaign to see all children jabbed was started last year after the formerly extinct disease was found in the city’s sewer system, with the virus thought to have possibly re-entered open-borders Britain from abroad.

Despite this attempt to get the population most vulnerable to the disease vaccinated, uptake for the childhood polio jab in London remains well below the national average, with the country’s National Health Service now set to renew efforts to get more children inoculated against the virus, which can cause paralysis and even death.

“Until we reach every last child, we cannot be sure that we will not see a case of paralysis,” The Telegraph reports Dr Vanessa Saliba of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) as saying regarding the outbreak.

“Even a single case of paralysis from polio would be a tragedy as it is completely preventable,” she continued. “Only by improving vaccination coverage across all communities can we ensure resilience against future disease threats.”

Read more at: www.breitbart.com

The drug-resistant fungus Candida auris (C. auris) was only discovered some 15 years ago but is already one of the world’s most feared hospital microbes.

If it gets inside the body, the yeast-type fungus can affect the bloodstream, the nervous system and several internal organs. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that its mortality rate ranges from 30% to 53% of patients affected by an invasive infection.

What is more worrisome is that the fungus has proven to be resistant to the most common types of antifungal drugs. Some strains are resistant to all of the medicines we have, says BBC’s health correspondent James Gallagher.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there have been outbreaks in more than 30 countries. A 2020 review from case reports from those nations found almost 4,750 cases globally between 2009 and 2019.

Read more at: www.bbc.com

An estimated 20,000 people who flocked to Asbury University in Kentucky last month to participate in a two-week-long prayer event could have been exposed to measles by an attendee later found to be infected with the highly contagious virus, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned.

According to the CDC, measles, which spreads through the air when an infected person coughs or sneezes, “is so contagious that if one person has it, 9 out of 10 people of all ages around him or her will also become infected if they are not protected.”

Asbury University said in a statement that the infected revival participant is a Jessamine County resident who was unvaccinated and asymptomatic when they attended the event, which started on Feb. 8. The infected participant attended the event on Feb. 18.

As of Feb. 28, only 3 cases of measles have been reported nationwide, including the Asbury revival participant. The agency urges doctors to “be on high alert for measles symptoms” among people who attended the event.

Read more at: www.christianpost.com

Officials say deaths of homeless people skyrocketed to a record number in 2022, and half of those involved fentanyl overdoses.

310 homeless people died in the Seattle area according to a count from the King County Medical Examiner’s Office reported by the Seattle Times.

That’s 65% greater than the number of homeless Seattle deaths in 2021 and far greater than the previous record of 195 homeless Seattle deaths set in 2018.

Of those, more than half involved fentanyl overdoses.

Another 18 homeless people died by homicide in the Seattle area, a figure twice as high as that from 2021.

10 homeless people died from exposure of hyperthermia in 2022, while suicide claimed the lives of seven homeless people.

Read more at: www.theblaze.com