Animal health

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1995:

Mongolian authorities on August 24 quarantined 50 people in
Mankhan county, Hovd province, after a 17-year-old trapper contracted
bubonic plague while skinning marmots.
Plague broke out simultaneously on a state farm near Bryansk,
Russia, near the Belarus border, killing 400 pigs but no people.
Nature’s Recipe in July recalled and destroyed several thousand
tons of dry dog food that caused dogs to vomit because of contamination
from a wheat fungus called deoxynivalenol, vomatoxin for short,
which appears after wet growing seasons. It isn’t lethal to either dogs or
humans, just not pleasant to have.

Drought increased concentrations of botulism bacteria in
British waterways during late summer, killing more than 1,000 swans at
the National Swan Sanctuary and also seriously afflicting ducks and geese.
“We have a national crisis on our hands,” said sanctuary founder Dorothy
Beeson. “The birds can be treated, but only if we have the resources to do
it. Unfortunatley, these resources are running out at a rapid rate.”
The FDA on August 18 approved the addition of the antibiotic
s a r a f l o x a c i n to chickens’ drinking water to lower the incidence of the
deadly E. coli bacteria in their feces. The maker, Abbott Laboratories, is
required to test poultry on a regular basis to detect any indication that bacteria
might be evolving to resist the antibiotic.
Wisconsin agriculture officials in late August contained t h e
state’s first outbreak of bovine tuberculosis in over a decade. Finding all
the cattle who had been exposed took about 10 days.
Equine encephalitis hit Zulia state in western Venezuela during
early September, killing two children along with many horses, cows,
and donkeys. It was Venezuela’s worst such outbreak in 33 years.
Barranquilla, Columbia, on September 7 acknowledged treating
five people for the highly contagious Weil disease, spread by parasites
of rats, dogs, and pigs, and capable of killing a victim within four days.