'I can haz blood?' The surprising world of pet blood transfusions

Don Juan, Napoleon, Gucci, Azur, and Marissa are very friendly and will rush to welcome anyone who enters their room, and that's what makes them good blood donors. "I chose them for their hematological characteristics, but also for their good disposition. We didn't want cats that would be stressed when handled or that needed excessive sedation," said Dr. Marie-Claude Blais, Professor at the University of Montreal's Faculty of Veterinary Medicine. Where they are housed, the five cats (four males and one female) can climb to the top of their trapeze and out into the yard through a cat flap. They can lounge on a hammock all day long or play cat and mouse. What is more, the door to their room is never locked, so they can get their daily dose of hugs, a benefit not necessarily stipulated in their contract. "Our cats are chosen by interview. In the last selection process, out of the 12 cats we evaluated, we only ended up keeping one," Blais said.

An ethics committee oversees the various aspects of this unique blood bank, which also includes canine "volunteers." Unlike their feline counterparts, Bacho, Dali, Gaspard, Bowie, and Dexter do not live at the CHUV University Veterinary Hospital, but with their families. They come to the hospital at the request of veterinarians and give blood once every six weeks at most. "It's true that the idea of animals donating blood is strange," Blais said, "but the dogs seem to adapt well. Anyway, they don't seem to mind coming to the hospital."

Which animals need blood transfusions? Mainly those on the operating table, but also bleeding accident victims or anemic animals with cancer or immune dysfunctions, for example.

The blood bank already existed before Dr. Blais arrived in 2008, but she has given it a new dimension. "Let's say I optimized the service -- everything had to be rethought, from changing the blood collection bags to redefining protocol." Maintenance and turnover of blood products requires proven expertise. Storage life is limited and the quantities needed for transfusions fluctuate constantly. "Sometimes we have immediate needs we can't meet, sometimes we have to throw out expired units. It breaks our heart," Blais said.

Clinician and researcher

Dr. Blais' research activities focus on internal medicine and veterinary hematology. "A lot of knowledge has developed in my field of internal medicine, but there is much to discover in some areas," she said. On top of her research, she is giving courses in Gastro-intestinal Diseases, Emergency Medicine, and Nutrition, running two wetlabs and supervising graduate seminars. She also devotes herself to a clinic for small animals every two weeks, which requires about 45 hours of work.

Blais came to the University of Montreal after conducting a postdoctoral fellowship in Transfusion Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 2006. She documented a new blood type in dogs: DAL for "Dalmatian." "I remember dancing in my office when I realized I was dealing with a new canine blood group," she said.

Her discovery caused a stir when her article, published in 2007 in the Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine, received praise from the editor, Jane Wardrop of the University of Washington. In the editorial entitled "A Welcome Discovery," the author pays tribute to the Quebec researcher. Her findings provide "an exciting and welcome addition to the current body of knowledge in veterinary transfusion medicine and will hopefully prompt further research in this area," it said.

Dottie and Henriette

Blais made her discovery while following the case of a dog name Dottie. Brought by her owner to the Veterinary Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania due to health problems, the dog received a preliminary blood transfusion to underg

o surgery. A few days later, a second transfusion was needed; in the meantime, however, the dog had developed antibodies that prevented a new transfusion.

In fact, no blood available was compatible with Dottie's system, and the staff wanted to stop there. "Why not investigate further?" Blais asked. "We would have done it for humans."

It must be noted that the blood system of dogs is quite different from ours. When the researcher took on the subject, 12 canine blood groups were known. Dogs do not have antibodies in their blood directed against most of these. Consequently, an animal can receive blood from almost any other individual; its immune system will accept it. It's during the second transfusion that things get complicated, because it can be fatal.

As a result, none of the 55 blood donors at the US veterinary hospital had a system compatible with Dottie's. "We had to call upon the Dalmatian breeding community, and the response was immediate. Through social networks, we had blood samples from 13 Dalmatians in 48 hours. Three were compatible."

Subsequent research showed that several Dobermans and a Shih Tzu had a similar blood type. More recently, it was discovered that a dog kept at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, a Beagle named Henriette, had the same blood type. This discovery opened up a whole new area of research.

With her team in Pennsylvania, she repeated her exploit by revealing a similar rarity among cats (she co-authored the article published in the same issue of the Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine). "There are certainly other groups and sub-groups to document," says the researcher smiling.

She notes that her canine blood bank is looking for casual donors. With approximately 50 animals, the network can accommodate other "volunteers." They are looking for dogs of good size, healthy, and an easy-going temperament. They must be able to cooperate willingly with veterinary medicine.

Extinct kitten-sized hunter discovered

Western Reserve University student and his mentor have discovered an ancient kitten-sized predator that lived in Bolivia about 13 million years ago -- one of the smallest species reported in the extinct order Sparassodonta.

Third-year undergraduate student Russell Engelman and Case Western Reserve anatomy professor Darin Croft made the finding by analyzing a partial skull that had been in a University of Florida collection more than three decades.

The researchers report their finding in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

"The animal would have been about the size of a marten, a catlike weasel found in the Northeastern United States and Canada, and probably filled the same ecological niche," said Engelman, an evolutionary biology major from Russell Township, Ohio.

The researchers refrained from naming the new species mainly because the specimen lacks well-preserved teeth, which are the only parts preserved in many of its close relatives.

The skull, which would have been a little less than 3 inches long if complete, shows the animal had a very short snout. A socket, or alveolus, in the upper jaw shows it had large, canines, that were round in cross-section much like those of a meat-eating marsupial, called the spotted-tailed quoll, found in Australia today, the researchers said.

Although sparassodonts are more closely related to modern opossums than cats and dogs, the group included saber-toothed species that fed on large prey. This small Bolivian species probably fed on the ancient relatives of today's guinea pigs and spiny rats, the researchers said.

"Most predators don't go after animals of equal size, but these features indicate this small predator was a formidable hunter," Croft said.

The specimen had not been studied in detail after being collected. It was provisionally identified as belonging to a particular group of extinct meat-eating opossums, due in part to its small size. Further adding to the identity challenge, almost all small sparassodonts have been identified by their teeth and lower jaws, which this skull lacks.

Croft wanted to study the skull because its age is nearly twice that of the oldest known species of meat-eating opossum. The specimen was found in a mountainous site known as Quebrada Honda, Bolivia, in 1978, in rock layers dated 12 million to 13 million years ago.

Structurally, extinct meat-eating opossums and sparassodont skulls share a number of similarities due to their similar meat-eating diet, Engelman said.

"No single feature found in the skull was so distinctive that we could say one way or the other what it was," Croft said, "but the combination of features is unique and says this is a sparassodont."

One key was that a particular bone of the orbit, the boney socket of the eye, does not touch the nasal bone in an opossum but does in a sparassodont.

The short snout was a kind of red herring. While jaguar-sized sparassodonts had them, the smaller members of the order had fox-like faces. And this species was smaller than most of those.

These smaller sparassodonts also have gaps between their teeth that are absent in most larger species. The skull shows no gaps.

Overall, the animal's features are a mixture of those found in different species of sparassodonts, but are not characteristic of in any one subgroup within the order. That puts this species near the bottom of the family tree, the researchers said.

Croft, who regularly collects from the same site where the skull was found, will return there this summer to gather evidence he hopes will show whether this species lived in an open grassland, forest or mixed habitat.

He also hopes to find the lower jaw, which may enable direct comparisons with known species and provide enough foundation to name the animal.

Countering caregiver placebo effect in pets

How do you know that your pet is benefiting from its pain medication? A new clinical trial design could help overcome pet owners' unconscious observation bias and determine whether the drugs they test are effective.

When animals are recruited for clinical trials, particularly for pain medications, researchers must rely on owner observation to determine whether the medication is working. Sounds simple enough, but as it turns out, human and animal behavior can affect the results.

All clinical trials have a "control" -- often a set of participants that receive a placebo in place of the medication. In human trials researchers have long struggled with the placebo effect -- the psychological impact that the patient's belief in the treatment can have on his or her condition. To get around this, researchers put a lot of effort into developing tools sensitive enough to distinguish between the placebo effect and the medication's "real" effect.

"In veterinary medicine, we're one step removed from the patient, and so we run into what we call the 'caregiver placebo effect,' which is how we refer to a number of factors that result in unconscious influence on owners' responses," says Margaret Gruen, NC State veterinary clinician and researcher. "Merely observing behavior can change it, and any changes in daily routine, like administering medication, will affect the way you relate to that animal and change its behavior." This makes controlling for the placebo effect more difficult, and even the most sensitive detection techniques still have trouble distinguishing between the real and the placebo effect.

Take cats for example. Inscrutable at the best of times, they are also notorious for their reluctance to take medication. So if your cat is participating in a clinical trial for pain medication, both your relationship to the animal and its behavior are going to undergo some pretty significant changes once you start administering medication. And these changes will occur whether or not your pet likes the medication or placebo. That, coupled with your optimism about what the results may be and the fact that you're now closely scrutinizing the cat's every move, can change your responses. "We cannot get away from this," says Dr. Gruen, "so we need to find a way around it."

To do so, Gruen and lead researcher Duncan Lascelles tested a low dose of a drug commonly used for pain management in cats with degenerative joint disease. They started by giving all of the trial participants an initial two-week placebo to get the animals used to taking the medication. The owners were aware that they were giving placebo during this period. This was followed by a three-week trial, with half of the participants receiving the drug and half receiving placebo, without the owners knowing which was which. Finally, there was a three-week "blinded placebo washout," in which all of the participants were again taking a placebo, but the owners weren't aware of the change.

"The final three-week period is where we were able to get real results about the usefulness of the medication," Gruen says. "During the three week medication trial, all of the owners indicated that their pets improved, which is due to the caregiver placebo effect. But during the washout phase, owners of the cats who had been receiving the medication in the first phase said that their pet's signs of pain were returning, while the owners of cats who had received placebo in the first phase did not notice any change.

"So we were able to circumvent the placebo effect and determine that this medication is effective in cats with degenerative joint disease," Gruen continues. "We understand that this approach will need further investigation, but we believe this design may be useful both in veterinary studies and in human studies where the placebo effect is particularly strong."

Nasty parasitic worm, common in wildlife, now infecting U.S. cats

When Cornell University veterinarians found half-foot-long worms living in their feline patients, they had discovered something new: The worms, Dracunculus insignis, had never before been seen in cats

"First Report of Dracunculus Insignis in Two Naturally Infected Cats from the Northeastern USA," published in the February issue of the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, document the first proof that this raccoon parasite can infect cats.

The worms can grow to almost a foot long and must emerge from its host to lay eggs that hatch into larvae. It forms a blister-like protrusion in an extremity, such as a leg, from which it slowly emerges over the course of days to deposit its young into the water.

Worms in the Dracunculus genus are well known in human medicine. D. insignis' sister worm, the waterborne Guinea worm, infected millions of humans around the world until eradication efforts beginning in the 1980s removed it from all but four countries -- with only 148 cases reported in 2013. Other Dracunculus worms infect a host of other mammals -- butDranunculus insignis mainly infects raccoons and other wild mammals and, in rare cases, dogs. It does not infect humans.

The cats that contracted the Dranunculus insignis worms likely ingested the parasites by drinking unfiltered water or by hunting frogs," said Araceli Lucio-Forster, a Cornell veterinary researcher and the paper's lead author.

It takes a year from the time a mammal ingests the worm until the females are ready to migrate to an extremity and start the cycle anew.

While the worms do little direct harm beyond creating shallow ulcers in the skin, secondary infections and painful inflammatory responses may result from the worm's emergence from the host. There are no drugs to treat a D. insignis infection -- the worms must be removed surgically.

"Although rare in cats, this worm may be common in wildlife and the only way to protect animals from it is to keep them from drinking unfiltered water and from hunting -- in other words, keep them indoors," said Lucio-Forster.

Zoonotic feline tularemia prevented by finding influential geospatial factors

 A Kansas State University epidemiologist is helping cats, pet owners and soldiers stay healthy by studying feline tularemia and the factors that influence its prevalence.

Ram Raghavan, assistant professor of diagnostic medicine and pathobiology, and collaborative researchers have found that a certain combination of climate, physical environment and socio-ecologic conditions are behind tularemia infections among cats in the region. More than 50 percent of all tularemia cases in the U.S. occur in Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas, Raghavan said.

Francisella tularensis, a bacterium that causes tularemia, commonly circulates among ticks, rabbits and rodents in the wild, but also frequently infects domestic cats. Tularemia is a zoonotic disease that can spread to humans through ticks or insect bites, eating undercooked rabbit meat, close contact with infected animals or even through airborne means. If left untreated, it can cause death in humans and animals, Raghavan said.

While it is not known exactly how many human tularemia cases are caused by exposure to infected cats, it is possible for cats to transmit the disease to owners through bites and scratches. Cats also can be reliable sentinels for recognizing disease activity in the environment. If cats hunt outdoors or come into contact with an infected rabbit or animal, they can bring tularemia back to their owners.

Raghavan's research so far has found that tularemia is more likely to appear:

* In newly urbanized areas.

* In residential locations surrounded by grassland.

* In high-humidity environments. Raghavan found that locations where tularemia was confirmed had high-humidity conditions about eight weeks before the disease appeared.

For the research, Raghavan is partnering with the university's geography department and the Public Health Department of Fort Riley Medical Activity. Raghavan maps tularemia cases confirmed by the Kansas State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory and then collaborates with John Harrington Jr. and Doug Goodin -- both professors of geography -- to compile geospatial data for tularemia locations. By bringing in layers of data the researchers are determining how different influential factors -- such as climate, land cover, landscape and pet owners' economic conditions -- can lead to feline tularemia.

"Taking a multidisciplinary and computational approach helps us quickly understand the disease and make new discoveries," Raghavan said. "We use diagnostic information collected over time at the Kansas State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory and a wealth of extremely useful information from NASA and other agencies. We can then put all these data in a framework where it is useful for public health and animal health."

While tularemia is more common in young children and men, people also can get the disease when mowing lawns in a contaminated area, Raghavan said. Both human and feline tularemia cases peak through late spring and summer -- when the weather is warmer, more ticks are present and more people are outside. Tularemia cases decrease at summer's end.

"Climate plays such a huge role in zoonotic diseases," Raghavan said. "With all the talk about climate change, we need to know if there are any significant climate effects that are causing tularemia cases to increase."

Tularemia also poses concerns for the military and soldiers during training exercises, whether they are training in U.S. bases or bases around the world. During training, soldiers are actively engaged in the environment and that increases the risk of tularemia infection.

"They could be crawling on the ground and may come in contact with a dead animal or rabbit that was infected with tularemia," Raghavan said. "The soldiers also can be bitten by ticks. All it takes is a few bacteria to cause infection."

Because of the low infection dose of organisms, it is even more important to understand tularemia because of its potential as a bioterrorism tool, Raghavan said.

"If a little of the bacteria was present in the form of an aerosol, it could be released in a crowded area and potentially infect a lot of people very quickly," Raghavan said. "Because it is such a rare disease, not everyone is prepared for it, even though the treatments are very simple. Untreated infections can cause death."

Symptoms of tularemia in humans may include fever, swelling of lymph nodes, skin ulcers near tick bites, or cough, chest pain and difficulty breathing in more serious cases. Clinical signs in cats include lethargy, anorexia and fever. People should contact their doctor or their veterinarian if they observe tularemia symptoms, Raghavan said.

The researchers recently published their work in the journal of Vector Borne and Zoonotic Diseases.

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Cat parasite found in western Arctic Beluga deemed infectious

University of British Columbia scientists have found for the first time an infectious form of the cat parasite Toxoplasma gondii in western Arctic Beluga, prompting a health advisory to the Inuit people who eat whale meat

The same team also discovered a new strain of the parasite, previously sequestered in the icy north, that is responsible for killing 406 grey seals in the north Atlantic in 2012.

Presenting their findings today at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Michael Grigg and Stephen Raverty from UBC's Marine Mammal Research Unit say that the "big thaw" occurring in the Arctic is allowing never-before-seen movement of pathogens between the Arctic and the lower latitudes.

"Ice is a major eco-barrier for pathogens," says Michael Grigg, a molecular parasitologist with the U.S. National Institutes of Health and an adjunct professor at UBC. "What we're seeing with the big thaw is the liberation of pathogens gaining access to vulnerable new hosts and wreaking havoc."

Toxoplasmosis, also known as kitty litter disease, is the leading cause of infectious blindness in humans and can be fatal to fetuses and to people and animals with compromised immune systems.

"Belugas are not only an integral part of Inuit culture and folklore, but also a major staple of the traditional diet. Hunters and community members are very concerned about food safety and security," says Raverty, a veterinary pathologist with the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture and Lands' Animal Health Centre and an adjunct professor at UBC. Raverty has led the systematic sampling and screening of hunter-harvested Beluga for 14 years.

Grigg has also identified the culprit of the 2012 grey seal die-off as a new strain ofSarcocystis. While not harmful to humans, the Arctic parasite, which was namedSarcocystis pinnipedi at the AAAS meeting today, has now killed an endangered Steller sea lion, seals, Hawaiian monk seals, walruses, polar and grizzly bears in Alaska and as far south as British Columbia.