Hope You Guess My Name

This Mystery Canine Respiratory Disease is getting a lot of press right now. I haven’t spent a lot of time looking at mainstream media (preferring instead to focus on the advice of respiratory specialists), but I can sympathize with the anxiety that these reports may have elicited in your household and FaceBook friend circle.

Every year, all the time, but particularly during certain seasons, there are a lot of dogs coughing. Canine respiratory infections come from a mixture of viruses and bacteria cooperating to cause airway discomfort, and that manifests as coughing. It’s called the CIRDC or canine respiratory disease complex. CIRDC has always been a feature of canine medicine; what seems to have changed over the last several weeks and months is the prolonged duration of airway irritation (6 weeks or more) and a more intense struggle to stamp out late complications in some patients.

With no official reporting system and no official guidelines to distinguish “regular” patients from “mystery” patients, the number of dogs involved in this syndrome is very nebulous. The decision to enter any suspicious cases into a focus group is totally at the discretion of their individual veterinarians, each with their own idea of what they’d consider “suspicious”. Little progress can be made to define any health issue without a specific population to investigate; thus, factual connections just don’t exist yet and will probably not be known for quite some time.

With so little concrete information available, it’s no wonder we’ve become somewhat frustrated and desperate, perhaps even a bit gullible. Although many experts in canine infectious disease believe that the source of this issue will be identified as a virus, perhaps even a very familiar one, a “strange new bacterium” has become the media darling of the moment. Humans are a pretty egotistical species, assuming anything previously unknown to them must be “new”. (Looking at you, Christopher Columbus!) However, it’s entirely possible that this recently identified organism has been around a long time and has only just caught our attention. When media reports label something as “new” and employ words like “funky”, “bizarre”, or “weird”, our anxiety level is bound to increase. Don’t rise to the bait. There is a lot of weird, wonderful stuff out there in the world of medicine, and the vast majority of it is NOT hell-bent on killing our pets.

We don’t know enough about this syndrome to give it a name, so even the most knowledgeable infectious disease specialists are calling it “Mystery Canine Respiratory Disease”. There is only a tenuous connection between recent events and a “funky new bacterium” (properly named IOLA KY405, in case you’d like to monitor its meteoric rise to stardom… or 15 minutes of fame). Meanwhile, a soup of germs has been floating around, causing respiratory disease in dogs for decades, sparring with veterinarians and providing the conditioning we need to confront even a new and nameless foe. For reliable ways to team up with your vet against… whatever this is, look to our next installment.

Dr. M.S. Regan