How to protect your dog against monkeypox

By Maleeha Sheikh

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its monkeypox guidance to include dogs as animals that can catch the virus.

This comes after the first suspected case of a pet dog contracting the virus from its owners in France.

“Initially this virus was transmitted from non-human animals in the endemic countries to humans through close contact, so it’s really no surprise that other non-human animals that are pets can get this as well,” says Dr. Isaac Bogoch, who is an infectious disease specialist.

Dr. Bogoch says it’s safe to assume that your pet — whether a dog or a cat, could get monkeypox from you if you have the virus.

Dr. Scott Weese who is an infectious disease veterinarian agrees.

“We realize more and more that we interchange a lot of bacteria and viruses with animals and monkeypox was one that was really understudied. We didn’t know what species it could infect,” says Dr. Weese.

Based on the case in France, humans can pass the virus onto their dog but what about the other way around?

“At this point we have to assume that if an animal has been infected by a person, they might be able to pass it back,” adds Weese.

So, what should you do if you have monkeypox and are also a pet owner?

Dr. Weese has this advice: “We want infected people to limit contact with animals as much as they can, don’t let them near your skin lesions, don’t cough on them, try to prevent that aerosol-type of exposure and just distance as much as possible. If the animal has been exposed, we want to keep the animal away from other people in case they’ve been infected.”

Weese says ideally you should keep a pet that has been exposed by monkeypox away from others for at least 21 days, which is the same recommendation for humans.

Medical experts say most people recover from monkeypox without needing treatment, but the lesions can be extremely painful. Severe cases can result in complications including brain inflammation and death.

Weese says he’s hopeful animals won’t deal with poor outcomes.

“We only have one dog so far and it was pretty mildly infected and I think with a lot of these viruses what they can do in different animal species really varies. Dogs aren’t really a natural host for this virus, cats probably aren’t a natural host. We can hope that they will get only very mild infections,” says Weese.

The infectious disease veterinarian says this virus is a human driven epidemic, so the best way to protect your animal is to reduce that human to animal spread. He adds taking your uninfected dog for a walk or to a dog park is a low-risk activity.

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