Thoughts IhadDrivingHome fromtheDogShow Caroline Coile "My dog is at the University of Florida vet school...he's very sick." "My dog is sick too...."
As more dogs fell ill with severe coughing and fever it became clear this wasn't just another bout of kennel cough or of people griping about some new dog show crud. We had the beginnings of a flu epidemic.
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ost of the affected dogs had in common that they or a housemate had attended either the May shows in Perry, Georgia or the shows in Deland, Florida the following week. Edy Dykstra-Blum was among the first to post daily Facebook reports of her Old English Sheepdog, Traynor's, battle that eventually landed him in isola- tion at the University of Florida Veterinary School. Three days after the Perry shows Traynor started coughing. "At first I thought it was kennel cough, but the incubation time was too short, and his tempera- ture was 103.7." Her veterinarian put him on antibi- otics. "Two days later I woke up to a sound of strange crackling breathing, like he was drowning. We took him to the ER vet at 2 in the morning, they took him through the back door and an x-ray confirmed pneu- monia... By that time all my other dogs were cough- ing..." Traynor and all her dogs at home tested posi- tive for H3N2. Traynor was admitted to the UF Hospital. "The isolation ward at UF was overfull in a few days," Edy recalls. "I was glad I could visit just one day dressed in full protective gear. Four days later, I could get my boy back and we were not even allowed to go near the entrance of the isolation ward, this is how serious this flu is." Karan Aurelius was also at those shows. Her dogs seemed fine until the first one started to cough seven days later. She, too, initially assumed kennel cough because the dog's temperature was normal. But her other dogs, even those that weren't at the show, start- ed to get sick as well. She had a litter of two-week old puppies at home. Their dam woke her up coughing in the middle of the night. Four hours later she was run- ning a temperature of 106. Karan had her at the vet clinic when they opened. "They wanted to admit her but by that time they knew it was something serious and contagious. They would have needed a positive
pressure isolation room, with its own air system and pressurized such that doesn't leak air into the rest of the clinic." More of her dogs started to show signs. Three of her five puppies got sick. "They went down fast," she recalls, "but they all survived." In all, 28 of the 30 dogs in her care eventually came down with the flu. It got worse. "Our house dogs' yard shares a common fence with my roommate's boarding kennel. We called all of our boarders with the news of what we still at that time thought was kennel cough. A Belgian Malinois that had already gone home got sick the next day---he died in the veterinarian's parking lot." The necropsy revealed canine flu H3N2. Karan, a former vet tech, spent two weeks nursing her dogs around the clock. "We kept charts on every- one---temperatures, appetite, medications. Everyone went on doxycycline, some on clavamox, some on even more medications. One needed a bronchodila- tor. There were sub-Q fluids to help keep tempera- tures down, nebulizers, some with essential oils. We were exhausted." She wasn't the only one. Rindi Gaudet was yet another of many professional handlers who not only worked around the clock to nurse sick dogs but also missed over a month of income. Four days after showing in Deland she was in Pennsylvania prepar- ing for shows when one dog, then the other, started to clear its throat. "By then we knew what it probably was, so I packed up everybody and went home." By the time she got home three dogs were coughing. By Monday all 22 of her dogs were coughing. "We had them all tested, but only the ones actively coughing ever came back positive." Her dogs were sick for over a week, but like Karan and others, her problems weren't over. During the 2015 H3N2 outbreak, one study looked at the dura- tion of shedding of active virus in order to guide iso-
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