Early COVID-19 pandemic suspicions about dogs’ resistance to the disease have given way to a long-haul clinical data gap as new variants of the virus have emerged.
Early COVID-19 pandemic suspicions about dogs’ resistance to the disease have given way to a long-haul clinical data gap as new variants of the virus have emerged.
« It is not confirmed that the virus can be transmitted from one dog to another dog or from dogs to humans, » said veterinarian Mohamed Kamel, a postdoctoral fellow at Purdue University.
During the pandemic’s early days, dogs seemed resistant to the coronavirus, showing little evidence of infection or transmission, said Mohit Verma, assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering and Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering. « As the virus evolved, or maybe the surveillance technology advanced, there seem to be more instances of potentially asymptomatic dogs, » Verma noted.
These are among the findings that Kamel, Verma and two co-authors summarized in a research literature review titled « Interactions Between Humans and Dogs in the COVID-19 Pandemic. » The summary, with recent updates and future perspectives, recently appeared in a special issue of the journal Animals on Susceptibility of Animals to SARS-CoV-2.
Additional co-authors are Rachel Munds, a research scientist at Krishi Inc. and a Purdue visiting scholar in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, and Amr El-Sayed of Egypt’s Cairo University.
Last June the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service announced it was committing up to $24 million for research related to SARS-CoV-2. The funding, provided by the American Rescue Plan Act, focuses on the One Health concept, which recognizes the link between the health of people, animals and the environment.
