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Pet travel changes – good for owners… but what about ?

Author : Emma Cooper

Categories : RVNs

Date : March 1, 2013

Emma Cooper VN Times assistant editor, reports on a recent Trust seminar exploring the good and bad of travel changes

ONE year after UK pet travel rules came into step with the rest of Europe, the Government has deemed harmonisation to be a success, making it “simpler, easier and cheaper to travel with your pet”.

However, vets, welfare groups and trading standards officials have voiced growing concerns about the disease risks posed by vacationing cats, dogs and ferrets – with , echinococcus worms and leishmaniosis all lurking around the corner.

Charity Dogs Trust organised a one-day seminar to discuss changes to the Pet Travel Scheme (PETS) and the risk of rabies and other diseases entering the UK, inviting charities, academics and veterinary professionals to air their views.

Welcoming delegates, Dogs Trust chief executive Clarissa Baldwin cautioned the event was “not an opportunity for scaremongering” while stressing the issue of foreign dogs illegally entering the country and PETS non-compliance “is a huge one and we need all of us to cooperate and work together on it”.

The Government’s view

AHVLA representative Deborah Wells talked through the PETS changes and outlined some official figures on pet transport.

1 / 6 She said: “There was a 61 per cent rise in pets entering [the UK] over the past 12 months – cats more than dogs (67 to 61 per cent) and around 2.5 per cent of pets presented for travel appear to be non-compliant.

“Compliance failures are more often to do with timings, for example, having blood tests done too soon after vaccination.”

She said the changes were, “good news for owners – there is now one scheme across the EU and it’s simpler, easier and cheaper to travel with your pet”.

Commenting on the risk of rabies entering the UK in the future, she said Europe had seen around 13,000 cases annually during the 1990s, while there were only 200 in 2011.

“The risk of rabies has increased with harmonisation,but it remains low – we’re likely to see a case perhaps once every 211 years,” Ms Wells said.

She appealed to her audience to report the illegal transportation of non-PETS compliant animals into the UK, saying the issue was “of obvious concern” to officials and that 417 cases had been reported to AHVLA last year.

She warned that politicians in Brussels were due to look at PETS this spring and that current proposals were a mixed bag, with welcomed measures such as setting an EU-wide blanket minimum travel age of 12 weeks, along with a possible derogation for very young unvaccinated animals, which she said DEFRA officials would oppose.

Rabies – still on the radar?

Glasgow-based epidemiologist Sarah Cleaveland gave a sobering presentation on the increasing incidence of rabies in developing countries.

She said: “Rabies is one of the few diseases where once we’ve got clinical signs it’s almost always fatal – but on a positive note it’s also one of the most preventable diseases.

“Ninety-eight per cent of human disease is down to dog bites – mostly in Africa and Asia. About 100 children die every day from rabies – from this completely preventable disease.”

According to Prof Cleaveland, every year more than 55,000 people die of rabies, however, the disease is being forgotten by those in the west.

“People living in rabies countries have increased anxiety – they fear the bite of the [rabid] dog more than they fear malaria – every case of a could mean a medical emergency,” she added.

2 / 6 She explained the difficulty of diagnosing rabies, with variable, sometimes vague, symptoms including “bone-inthroat” and abnormal behaviour. She showed images of children with horrific sustained from rabid dogs.

Prof Cleaveland also helps to oversee a mass canine rabies vaccination programme in the Serengeti. Last year the project, which is run through a local zoological society and supported with drugs from MSD Animal Health, reached a milestone one million animals vaccinated.

“Many of those countries seeing a decrease in human cases are ploughing millions into human vaccination, but without dealing with the dog reservoir we are not going to deal with the real problem,” she concluded.

Meanwhile, vet Paul Burr, chief executive of Biobest Laboratories, talked specifically about PETS and the rabies threat to the UK. Disagreeing with Ms Wells, he said rabies was “a low risk, but still a risk” and needed to be on every vet’s differential diagnosis list.

Mr Burr said EU harmonisation had flaws, particularly the fact that many listed, “low risk” countries have wildlife reservoirs carrying rabies.

“We’re allowing movement of animals from low risk areas with high risk endemic problems,” he said.

“There’s a lack of consistency here and this is what we need to be aware of in veterinary surgeries.”

According to Mr Burr, about six per cent of animals fail a blood test after rabies vaccination and “it’s just not realistic” to expect vaccination to be foolproof.

“We may have better checks [than elsewhere in EU], but how long will that continue?”

Mr Burr also cautioned vets and nurses in practice to be aware of potential disease risks from imported dogs, particularly animals from eastern Europe, and said Biobest has had two advice calls in the past year, from a worried vet and a nurse respectively, who had been scratched and bitten by foreign dogs.

Echinococcus – one worm on the horizon, another already here…

Vet Maggie Fisher, from pet parasite education group ESCCAP UK, talked about the spread of Echinococcus multilocularis on the continent. The tapeworm lives in canids and once it has infected a human it can incubate for up to 15 years, before presenting with symptoms akin to liver disease. If untreated – usually with surgery and anthelmintics – it can be fatal.

3 / 6 According to Dr Fisher, the worm has spread prolifically in eastern and central Europe due to the growth in urban foxes, and Switzerland now spends €3.5m each year treating human cases of the disease.

While the UK kept its requirement for treating dogs against E multiocularis from 2012, Dr Fisher also advised cats could be potential carriers and said they should also be treated before entry into the UK.

She concluded: “The UK epidemiological and climate conditions appear to be suitable for E multilocularis becoming established, as we have the intermediate and definitive hosts for its survival and spread including voles, musk rats, both urban and rural foxes and domestic dogs.

“Once established in Britain, it would be difficult if not impossible to eradicate.”

However, E granulosus, a relative of E multilocularis, is an established problem in the UK, and Welsh Government veterinary advisor Arjen Brouwer gave delegates a rundown of the Welsh experience in trying to educate farmers about the worm.

Like E multilocularis, E granulosus, is millimeters long and almost undetectable to the human eye. Known as “dog tapeworm” it infects the intestines of dogs, but has humans and livestock as intermediate hosts. Infection results in hydatid disease, with cysts that can reach the size of a football growing in internal organs.

Mr Brouwer explained that in the past canine infection was often the result of animals eating infected offal. He said a big push had been made in south Wales in the mid-1980s to educate farmers and promote worming and that, subsequently, studies had shown a decline and resurgence in dog populations.

The latest study in 2008 found a fifth of farms in south Powys, Wales had at least one dog infected with E granulosus, however, that study also showed routine and systematic worming was highly effective.

Mr Brouwer also presented findings of hydatid cysts in cattle, as collected by the Welsh Government from 19 abattoirs in Wales and England in 2010-11. Investigators calculated eight cases per 10,000 animals going to slaughter.

He said: “This shows the disease is still present and we, as veterinary practitioners, need to be educating clients about this – they need to be medicating against both tapeworm and roundworm.”

In contrast to other talks about disease incursion, Mr Brouwer concluded with a warning about taking E granulosus on tour.

4 / 6 “We have this disease in the UK and by moving dogs about we’re possibly moving E granulosus about,” he said.

“By moving dogs out of the UK we may be taking it to other parts of the EU that haven’t got it yet.”

Illegal entrants

According to Rob Quest, from the City of London Trading Standards, 2012 saw a 400 per cent increase in the number of animals illegally entering the country, without meeting PETS requirements.

Mr Quest said: “Harmonisation was devised to help people move with their pets, but instead it’s being used by dealers who want to make money.”

He added: “What we want to do as an enforcement agency is target dealers, but we have a lot of problems tracking them. Instead, we have to deal with the poor person who has bought this pet in good faith and then we have to take that animal away.”

Mr Quest also bemoaned the lack of networking between the different agencies responsible for tracking imports and called for a joined-up approach by officials.

“Customs is picking up names of transporters and registration details, but it is not doing anything with that information,” he said.

Later in the day VN Times spoke to Neil Martin of Dorset Trading Standards.

He said his team had only seen five suspect cases of illegal entry picked up by just one vet practice in his region in the past year, a number he thinks is surprisingly low.

“It would be unfortunate if that was the only practice in all of Dorset to see such cases,” he said.

“We did a blood test on the latest animal, which showed it was unlikely it had even been vaccinated in the first place.”

He concluded: “There is definitely room for practices to be more vigilant. I always suspect the vast majority [of cases missed by vets] are going to be through polite ignorance rather than actually turning a blind eye.”

ON THE FRONT LINE: ONE CHARITY’S FIGHT AGAINST RABIES IN INDIA

5 / 6 ONE charity trying to make a difference to canine rabies is the VN-founded organisation Tree of Life for Animals (TOLFA).

Created by VN Rachel Wright in 2005, TOLFA runs an ongoing rabies vaccination project for the local stray dog population in the Rajasthan area of northern India, as well as providing rescue housing and veterinary treatment and running education programmes in the local community.

“India has the highest incidence of rabies anywhere in the world, with the stray dog population being between 95 per cent and 99 per cent responsible for the human death rate from the disease through dog bites,” Rachel told VN Times.

“Since its inception in 2005, TOLFA has sterilised and rabies vaccinated more than 15,000 stray dogs and continues to do so on a daily basis.

“We also go into schools and teach children how to wash a wound properly should they get bitten, as the virus is very unstable and often it is the washing of the wound properly that could save that child’s life.”

TOLFA also sends its rescue vehicle out into the local community, to collect suspect rabid dogs and bring them into the charity’s small animal hospital for monitoring.

According to Rachel, since TOLFA launched eight years ago, the number of people seeking post- bite treatment in government hospitals in the region has been steadily decreasing.

Commenting on her experiences of the disease and the UK’s need to stay rabiesfree, she added: “I have seen the terrible extent of this disease in all its different guises, but it is still an awful thing to witness – how a dog can deteriorate so rapidly from what looks to be perfectly healthy to death in a matter of a week.

“I hope the UK will uphold its strict quarantine laws [for animals from non-listed countries] so that rabies in the UK continues to remain a thing of the past.”

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