LEPTOSPIROSIS GEORGE E. MOORE, DVM, MS, PHD, DACVPM, DACVIM College of Veterinary Medicine, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
In this VETgirl-Zoetis webinar entitled “Canine Leptospirosis,” Dr. George Moore, DVM, MS, PhD, DACVPM, DACVIM reviewed all you need to know about canine leptospirosis. If you aren’t testing your AKI injury patients for it, you’re missing the diagnosis. If you missed the free webinar, you can view it HERE for a limited time.
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
2 Which serovars are important? The veterinary literature from the 1950s and 60s documented serosurveys of stray unvaccinated dogs in the US, and antibodies against Leptospira serovars Canicola and Icterohaemorrhagiae were most common in these dogs. Maintenance hosts for these two serovars are dogs and rats/rodents, respectively. Vaccines were therefore developed in the 1960s to protect dogs against these two serovars. From the mid-1970s to early 1990s, there were few published reports, in peer-reviewed literature, of canine leptospirosis in the US. Through the 1990s, case series reports of canine leptospirosis began to document (usually based on serology) canine
Leptospirosis is found in more than 150 mammalian species, and therefore the risk of this disease to dogs or cats must be dependent on the prevalence of leptospirosis in these species and subsequent environmental exposure risk to dogs. With this information, the pertinent patient history question is not “Does your dog have potential exposure to rats or livestock?” but rather “Does your dog have potential exposure to raccoons, deer, or skunks (or specifically their urine) in your research at Purdue University found that leptospirosis cases were more likely to be dogs from suburban, or recently urbanized, areas than from rural settings. Wildlife studies at other universities indicate that population densities of peri-urban wildlife may neighborhood or backyard?” 1 Approximately 10 years ago be 8-12 times greater than in their rural counterparts due to increased availability of food and lack of predators, thus increasing disease exposure risk. A recent review of leptospirosis cases from the VMDB (Veterinary Medical Database) from university teaching hospitals over the last 40 years documents a change in the signalment in diagnosed cases, with dogs less than 15 pounds proportionately more likely to be diagnosed with the disease than dogs in other weight groups. These small dogs in our experience have not been vaccinated against leptospirosis, leaving them susceptible to infection.
infections caused by nonvaccinal serovars. Thus, in the face of possible protection against serovars Canicola and Icterohaemorrhagiae, clinical cases were increasingly attributed to serovars Pomona, Grippotyphosa, Bratislava, and Autumnalis. Serovars Pomona and Grippotyphosa have been recognized pathogens in livestock (cattle and pigs) although until the 1990s they were not pathogens of concern to dogs. They now appear to be established within reservoir wildlife species, e.g. raccoons. The other two serovars (Bratislava and Autumnalis) are documented pathogens on other
continents. (continued)
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