Ever feel as if you have been misled, deceived or lied to by a veterinary practice ?
I haven't posted for a long time but somehow today I feel the need to return to the plight of Romanian rescue dogs in the UK .
The issue of foreign rescue dogs losing their lives here has not gone away, in fact if anything the situation is worsening with the tightening (and frightening) grip of the Corporates on our veterinary industry .
I feel the CMA completely missed the point .
Consumer choice is not solely about pricing it is also about policies
allowing a monopolistic stranglehold suffocates a choice in practice policies.
In the last few days alone I have seen:
One adopter not reaching out to offers of help but opting to have her dog of six years destroyed after testing positive
One adopter being asked £450 for a test which actually costs less than £50
One adopter who took her dog on holiday to Spain for five days now having it's non invasive treatment withheld while awaiting test results .
One adopter being told all her dogs must be tested as one of her pack originated from Romania .(Now there is a nice little earner )
Now dogs from Romania need APHA negative test results to enter the country (it is not retrospective as some appear to have been told ) you might think this would alleviate this threat to Romanian dogs...
But rescues do not relax...
Many practices are demanding re testing three months after arrival on the grounds the dog could have caught it on the transport.
Well yes, if it were an air born virus which it is not .
Well yes, if the dogs all travelled loose in the back of the transport van mating merrily on the journey which they don't.
The issue with the re test is that the flawed and inconclusive iElisa test tends to throw out pretty random results , so it is perfectly feasible that a dog could get a "positive" three months down the line despite having a negative before travel not because it has suddenly become infected... that is the job of the SAT test to detect (not always accurately ) but because of flaws in the iElisa test itself .
Then all you need for a disaster is an adopter not on Facebook totally reliant on the knowledge and integrity of their vet .
Or an adopter who prefers to believe their "professional " over the testimony of hundreds who live without any ill effect with a iElisa positive dog or reject any interpretation by someone with specialist knowledge on this disease .
(Most vets are not specialists in this field in fact the honest have admitted to not knowing much about it, hence the frequent confusion with other strains of brucellosis)
Why is the Brucella Canis phobia continuing ?
We know there are hidden agendas but what justification is most commonly given by the vet practices themselves ?
First and foremost is that it is zoonotic .
This is certainly true but...
With thousands of foreign rescue dogs in the UK over the last fifteen years I think the latest information in the table below should allay any rational person's fears .
Secondly it transmits to other dogs .
Certainly it can through mating but there is no evidence of transmission from neutered or spayed asymptomatic dogs (which covers the vast majority of Romanian rescues in this country )even when labelled positive on the back of that pernicious use of the iElisa test .
Rather emerging data (if anyone in the veterinary world is remotely interested ) shows hundreds of positive dogs living in the same households with negative dogs .
No transmission has taken place which shouldn't be surprising when you consider the iElisa test is not evidence of an infection, Brucella Canis is a venereal disease primarily transmitted through reproductive fluids and that most rescues are neutered.
So next time someone says to you the dog is a danger because the disease is zoonotic show them the latest government figures of actual cases and next time someone in a vet practice tells you people working in their practice have caught it /died from it reach for a pinch of salt .
I haven't posted for a long time but somehow today I feel the need to return to the plight of Romanian rescue dogs in the UK .
The issue of foreign rescue dogs losing their lives here has not gone away, in fact if anything the situation is worsening with the tightening (and frightening) grip of the Corporates on our veterinary industry .
I feel the CMA completely missed the point .
Consumer choice is not solely about pricing it is also about policies
allowing a monopolistic stranglehold suffocates a choice in practice policies.
In the last few days alone I have seen:
One adopter not reaching out to offers of help but opting to have her dog of six years destroyed after testing positive
One adopter being asked £450 for a test which actually costs less than £50
One adopter who took her dog on holiday to Spain for five days now having it's non invasive treatment withheld while awaiting test results .
One adopter being told all her dogs must be tested as one of her pack originated from Romania .(Now there is a nice little earner )
Now dogs from Romania need APHA negative test results to enter the country (it is not retrospective as some appear to have been told ) you might think this would alleviate this threat to Romanian dogs...
But rescues do not relax...
Many practices are demanding re testing three months after arrival on the grounds the dog could have caught it on the transport.
Well yes, if it were an air born virus which it is not .
Well yes, if the dogs all travelled loose in the back of the transport van mating merrily on the journey which they don't.
The issue with the re test is that the flawed and inconclusive iElisa test tends to throw out pretty random results , so it is perfectly feasible that a dog could get a "positive" three months down the line despite having a negative before travel not because it has suddenly become infected... that is the job of the SAT test to detect (not always accurately ) but because of flaws in the iElisa test itself .
Then all you need for a disaster is an adopter not on Facebook totally reliant on the knowledge and integrity of their vet .
Or an adopter who prefers to believe their "professional " over the testimony of hundreds who live without any ill effect with a iElisa positive dog or reject any interpretation by someone with specialist knowledge on this disease .
(Most vets are not specialists in this field in fact the honest have admitted to not knowing much about it, hence the frequent confusion with other strains of brucellosis)
Why is the Brucella Canis phobia continuing ?
We know there are hidden agendas but what justification is most commonly given by the vet practices themselves ?
First and foremost is that it is zoonotic .
This is certainly true but...
With thousands of foreign rescue dogs in the UK over the last fifteen years I think the latest information in the table below should allay any rational person's fears .
Secondly it transmits to other dogs .
Certainly it can through mating but there is no evidence of transmission from neutered or spayed asymptomatic dogs (which covers the vast majority of Romanian rescues in this country )even when labelled positive on the back of that pernicious use of the iElisa test .
Rather emerging data (if anyone in the veterinary world is remotely interested ) shows hundreds of positive dogs living in the same households with negative dogs .
No transmission has taken place which shouldn't be surprising when you consider the iElisa test is not evidence of an infection, Brucella Canis is a venereal disease primarily transmitted through reproductive fluids and that most rescues are neutered.
So next time someone says to you the dog is a danger because the disease is zoonotic show them the latest government figures of actual cases and next time someone in a vet practice tells you people working in their practice have caught it /died from it reach for a pinch of salt .
