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Hello everyone, it's Anthony Chadwick from the webinar vet, welcoming you to our first platinum webinar of 2018. So thank you so much for all turning up. We're all probably still a little bit in holiday mode, I suppose, but, the new year is well and truly on us now.
Very fortunate to have Mike Davis speaking for us again, . Pro vets, really sort of interesting, controversial topic to begin with, not that controversial in my view, but I think it is a controversial topic. It certainly gets people excited.
Evidence-based nutrition, feeding raw meat-based diets to pets, nutritional adequacy and safety. So, Mike, I think just over to you and let's, hear what your thoughts are. Yeah, thanks so much, Andrew.
Well, I've been interested in the whole concept of feeding raw for quite a long time, and periodically I do literature reviews to look at the evidence to support or not support such a practise, and I suppose over the last few years, as the more I've got involved in finding out what the truth is about things, the more concerned I've become about this increasing growth of feeding raw. I'm going to share with the listeners today some information which they may not have come across before, which I've just reviewed foodborne diseases in meat, and I was quite surprised to find out some of the things I should have known but didn't know. So what are we going to do this evening?
I'm going to speak quickly because I've got a lot of lots of information to get through. I'm going to talk about nutritional adequacy of raw diets, problems about feeding a homemade recipe. If you do give somebody a recipe which is supposed to be balanced, I'm going to talk about non-infection related health risks to pets.
And then also the meatborne infectious agents that can cause trouble for pets and intact pets and people as well. And my main concern is item number 5 on this list. My main concern is by increasing feeding of raw to animals who are increasing risks to people.
If if anybody goes on the internet or and has a look around, you'll find there's an awful lot of noise in the marketplace. The vast majority of the noise is from pro raw advocates rather than from people who are impartial, and there's very few people standing up on platforms and talking against feeding raw in a public environment. Now it doesn't matter what form raw takes, and there are lots of different ways it can be delivered.
Some of the biggest problems I see health related wise are people who seem to think that feeding raw chicken breasts or raw meat or raw fish to cats is what they need, and that's all they get, and that's a really imbalanced diet, as you all know and we're going to see later. And there are prepared foods which come nicely packaged which will have complete pet food on the label which claim to be complete and should be complete and if if they're following the guidelines that will have analysed the food to prove it's complete, but it doesn't take away from any of these products the risk that they can carry pathogenic organisms of their. Types including bacteria proo viruses and worms like nematodes which people seem to have forgotten about, but you know, Chiella is still out there in pork.
I'm not going to talk about worms tonight just because of time factors and also because in a way they're not going to be transmitted from the pet to the human. I'm mainly going to focus on this to humans as this presentation progresses. And some what the pro raw people say is dogs are related to wolves and should actually be fed raw raw carcass material that's more natural.
Use words like that, but you know, we also have originated from people or humanoid type organisms that did not cook food and would have eaten raw meat, but we're talking. About hundreds of thousands of years ago, cooking fires were first developed around a quarter million years ago. Now at the moment in the world, there are some human populations who will eat raw on a regular basis.
Obviously in Asia, raw fish is eaten quite commonly, and in Eastern European countries and state tartare is eaten quite regularly. But you, everybody knows, I think that if you eat raw, you accept that there is an increased risk of you contracting infectious agents from that raw, you know, and we do know, for example, some fairly nasty worms you can catch if you eat raw fish on a regular basis. But the truth is, if you look at the recent information which we've now managed to get from analysis of the genome, our domesticated dog breeds are not directly related to current wolf species.
They did have a common ancestry. In fact, the common ancestor isn't known and nobody knows what their common ancestors did eat. This is a very recent diagrammatical representation of how different dogs are related to each other and how they all relate through a historic evolution of the gene.
And wolves are essentially a separate group of canids. They there is common ancestry there, but they're not directly related. And in fact, one of the other misconceptions that pro raw people say is that dogs cannot utilise cereal grains and should only be fed meat-based diets, but this is not true.
We actually know there are 3 gene changes that are different between wolves, wolves, and domesticated dogs, and those gene changes allow the domesticated dog to be able to digest and utilise starches. And in fact, most dogs sequences belong to a divergent monophyletic clade and don't share common sequences with wolves. Also, the actual ability of domesticated dogs to digest and utilise grains, including stocks, has been well demonstrated in numerous in vivo and in vitro studies.
And by the way, I make statements like that. If anybody wants to see the studies, I'd be happy to try and provide individuals with reference lists after the presentation, just in the space to put all the references in all of these these different things. So different slides.
The other thing is that that the pro raw people say is kibble kills. Well, you know, there is no credible scientific evidence to show that health risks are higher from feeding commercially produced, dry, or canned cooked pet foods compared to feeding raw foods. And when foodborne infections are contracted from commercially cooked foods, it is due to accidental contamination, whereas we know, we all know that raw meats carry pathogenic organisms, so by feeding raw, we are increasing risk to the animal by doing that.
So the health risks, which is what I really want to get onto, would be nutritional inadequacies, and that can be a deficiency, for example, calcium toxicity, for example, excess vitamin A, or a gross imbalance in a food like in an inverse calcium phosphorus ratio or calcium copper, and these are all common problems that I see in animals being fed raw meat. Other health risks obviously are bone-related diseases from ingesting bones in the pet, and then more seriously infection-related disease in the pets and in in contact humans and other pets for that matter. So let's ask some basic questions first.
Can a dog or cat survive when it's fed raw foods as a sole ration, and the answer is yes. We all know people or know of people who are fed nothing but raw for the whole lifetime of an animal and it's lived in apparently normal, healthy, apparently healthy, normal lifespan. So the answer as to whether they can survive is yes, and the simple answer to whether a cat or dog can meet all of its basic defined.
Nutritional requirements from eating a carcass, the answer is yes, but there is a caveat to that. That's as long as the animal eats the correct balance of raw ingredients that are in a carcass, and also that then implies that the owner must make all of those balance of raw ingredients available to the animal, and oftentimes they don't. And the next question is, have commercially available raw foods or recipes for homemade raw foods been subjected to controlled AFO feeding trials to prove that they actually are complete and meet the nutrient requirements at all life stages?
This is important because there are two ways of putting complete pet food on the label. One is to is to have it as the final batch analysed chemically and to say it meets all the ingredient requirements. The other is to conduct a feeding trial which demonstrates that it actually will do what it's meant to do.
So if you want to feed a raw diet to growing puppies, for example, AFO will, will, and fed the app also will tell you how to conduct. Those feeding trials to make sure that they actually achieve what they're meant to do through a growth period, but as far as I'm aware, so far no raw diets have actually ever been subjected unsuccessfully completed a feeding trials. Now things do change.
So if something's happened in the last month and I don't know about it, I'm sure somebody will call me later and say that I was wrong. As far as I know, there's no evidence that there has been one. Next question is, is there evidence that eating a raw diet provides better health than eating a prepared food?
And again, the answer is unequivocally no. There is no credible evidence that animals fed raw are in better health than animals fed prepared foods. Overall, disease prevalence is as high or higher in wild dogs and cats than it is in captive animals, and certainly we know that longevity in wild animals is shorter compared to wild animals kept in captivity, but we can't honestly say that's just due to better nutrition because there are other factors like the use of vaccines, parasite controls, and other environmental factors that are removed.
So we can't say absolutely it's just nutrition, but there's no evidence that that proves that feeding a raw diet provides better health than eating a prepared food. Do cats and dogs always naturally select a balanced ration to meet their needs, avoiding deficiency or toxic amounts of ingredients when consuming raw food? And the answer is unequivocally no.
We know that when you feed raw diets to animals, they can develop serious nutrition-related disease, as well as obvious things like GI obstruction, and it depends on what they're given. Some of the most common nutritional problems I see clinically are animals being fed basically an all meat diet, all fish for cats, or all chickens, sometimes for cats and dogs or other meats, and I'll explain why they're so undesirable in the second. In the centre of this slide you can see a plate, which is a plate of raw food which is on a boxer forum in the UK, and this is claimed to be an ideal balance of raw meat to feed to your boxer.
Well, I can tell you because if you look on that plate, you'll see that there's a large chunk of raw liver, and I can tell you if you feed that much liver every day to a boxer or any other dog, it will develop hypervitamiosis A because liver contains extremely high amounts of vitamin. And it's very easy to get to that situation. When I qualified back in 1976, owners, people still often ate liver in the house, and so I saw lots of cases of hypervitamin A in cats and dogs because owners were giving them raw liver, and that that plate there is definitely not a balanced diet that will be a satisfactory to any animal long term on a regular basis.
On the left you can see some poultry necks, and when I was in the hospital working at the University of A before I left last December, and just before I left, we had a dog come in. It was popular in the Derby area for people to feed raw necks like that, and duck neck was particularly popular, and we had a dog come in which was in quite a lot of distress. And we could feel the hold of the neck in the stomach because the dog had swallowed the whole thing entirely.
It hadn't chewed it at all and it was in a lot of distress. So this type of activity it doesn't demonstrate that dogs will always be sensible when faced with a place of food or that the owners are prepared to put down what they actually need. For owners that are feeding just raw meat, which is essentially what a lot of these dogs are getting.
They should be showing this chart. This chart shows how much imbalance there is in an all meat diet. If you feed meat, to meet 100% of the requirements, so they left.
And side of the chart is the 100% requirement. If you feed enough calories as muscle meat, you'll see this is what happens to the rest of those nutrients in that in that box in terms of meeting requirements. Obviously if you're feeding a lot of protein, you're going to way exceed the protein requirements over 5 times as much protein as a dog needs.
And then there are only two other ingredients on that list which meet the minimum requirements. One of them is magnesium and the other is potassium, and that's because they're intracellular and obviously meat tissue contains a lot of cells. Every other nutrients on that list, there is insufficient amounts in the food that's being fed.
Even phosphorus, which is the blue column, although it's a considerable amount of phosphorus compared to calcium, they've got a massive inverse calcium phosphorus ratio, there still is inadequate amounts of phosphorus to meet minimum requirements by feeding an all meat diet to an animal. So an all meat diet isn't just calcium deficiency and phosphorus success. It in terms of calcium phosphorus ratio, it's actually deficient in essential nutrients like copper, iron, and the vitamins.
At Davis, California, they were interested in looking at growth in kittens, and they took two groups of kittens. They fed one a commercial growth diet and the other they fed whole ground rabbits. And what they found were quite interesting.
They found that actually growth rates were similar. The kittens that were fed raw, actually they, they graded their coat and skin quality and they felt that they were healthier being fed raw. But 10 months into the study, one of the cats on the raw group suddenly died, and when it was postmortem, it died from dilated cardiomyopathy proven to be due to taurin deficiency.
So they echocardiographed and the other kittens in the group, and 70% of the cats being fed raw had dilated cardio cardiomyopathy associated with urin deficiency. This is quite bizarre because on analysis of the diet there was far, far in excessive minimum requirements of taurine in the food, but for some reason it wasn't bioavailable to the kittens, and this type of issue about DCM in touring has also been described in dogs being fed raw as well. Now, a lot of people think it, I've said already that you could feed a dog or a cat a balanced diet from just the carcass.
What that means then is you have to give the owner a recipe which they will follow and that that then should be able to provide the animal with a complete ration. Unfortunately, all the evidence we have is that you cannot just Give a home home prepared ration to an animal and and expect it to do what it's supposed to do. In this study by Jennifer Lawson, they looked at, in fact they were looking at recipes for CKD in cats and dogs.
They looked at a total of 67 home prepared. Diets and when they actually looked at what these diets contained, these have been mainly put together by people with the scientific interests, veterinarians with some sort of qualification in nutrition, and what they found was actually the vast majority of these diets did not provide adequate nutrition and it would have been inappropriate for any long term feeding and would actually have been harmful in CKD, not beneficial. I myself did a paper, did a study which got published in that record in 2014 where we looked at a homemade recipe that was in wide use and we gave it to 6 of our qualified nurses who were really interested in nutrition and we asked them to make the recipe at home and then we had them all analysed and what we found was huge.
Variation between them and I'm not going to go through all the results because I haven't got time, but the maximum variation we found for a declared recipe was 76% more protein in one of the diets that should have been in it based on the declared analysis, 61% higher than fibre and of course fibre reduces bioavailability of other nutrients and you know an incredible difference between just 6. Nurses making 6 rations in the Derby area. If you took that recipe and distribute it across the UK or Europe or the world, what variability are you're going to get based on raw ingredients are going to go to that recipe.
So basically our take home message is you cannot rely on homemade recipes. Even if they were put together and were shown to be accurate in an institution, you cannot rely on giving them to owners and for them to then follow them diligently, because they don't, they use different raw ingredients and they use different methodologies for pushing these diets together. Well, two things I was taught at university when I went there and I still believe.
The first is that most animals get better despite what we do, and the second one was first do no harm. And there there there's just so much information that most of you will know already about the problems associated with incorrect nutrition. Obviously, you know, if you, if you feed a neck bone or any vertebral bone to an animal and it's got spiky bits, it can get stuck anywhere in the alimentary tract.
And one of the worst case scenarios, of course, for foreign body obstructions is in the thoracic cavity because if what if that bone perforates through the oesophagus, we can end up with serious pyothorax, and in fact that's a life threatening condition because the outcome isn't always that successful. And there is no need to feed whole bones to dogs. They do not require them, and every single person listening to this broadcast will have to remove foreign bodies from animals because they've been fed bones.
So increasing feeding of that type of bone to animals is crazy. The middle picture is an absolutely classic picture of an animal being fed all meat diet. It's got very poor bone mineralization.
It's got a thin cortices. It's got a folding fracture on the humerus, the left humerus, and it's got a healing. Fracture both the radius and ulna further down the limb, and this is classic because it's an animal being fed just meat, it doesn't contain any calcium, there's inadequate calcium there for the bones to form normally.
This is actually a 6 month old cat that you can see being fed in all meat diet. To right, that's an animal with that is cardiomyopathy which can be caused by taurine deficiency, and in the bottom right you've got hypervitamiosis A in a more elderly animal. This is an older cat that was being fed vitamin, excess vitamin A in the form of liver.
And it doesn't have to be just exclusive liver feeding, just a reasonable amount on a regular basis will cause these types of changes, the new bone being deposited around articular joints and also around vertical joints. So you often get pain in the neck, difficulty moving the neck, or actual lameness in the in the limbs associated with this. And with the increasing advent of feeding raw, I think we're going to see a lot more hypervis say in our dogs going forward.
And the bottom left, and I always show this, and I'm amazed how few people know this, and this is palace in the puppy and basically if you feed excessive vitamin A, as you can do with raw liver to bits during pregnancy, you can actually induces in the puppy and cleft palate, and this is due to the fact that the vitamin A imbalance interferes with spatial alignments of the of the bony plates that they're forming in the ember. So bone-related disease, I mean, you know, foreign body instruction is very common and they result even in the cases where the majority of the most successful of course, but they still have to have an anaesthetic and surgery to get rid of them, and in the worst cases they can be fatal. The middle picture down there is a friend of mine, Ross Allen had that published.
In that record last year, this is rather unusual. This is a dog that's being fed raw and ate a chicken wing, and it passed through and got obstructed in the small intestine, but it caused an actual vulvulus of the small intestine which is extremely rare. It's not just an obstruction, it's actually rotated, which is rather unusual.
OK, so what are the issues? Well, one of the big issues is if we feed raw to a cat or a dog, and that raw food is carrying a pathogenic organism, it probably won't affect the animal if it's otherwise healthy. It may well be asymptomatic, but that animal will shed the organisms into the environment and in some cases, for example, with salmonella, we know that if you give salmonella to a dog, it will be shedding salmonella within 24 hours, even if it's healthy itself.
Some of those organisms can survive for very long periods of time in the environment and and even months, and they can be very difficult to move by normal cleaning methods. In fact, there's a, a paper which I'm going to show you in a minute, which has just been published recently about how difficult it is to remove salmonella from, eating utensils like dog bowls. And obviously most animals will lick or groom the cells, including the perineum that spreads organisms across the animal's body, and as you probably all know, Liverpool University has done studies showing that the oral concentrations of the zoonotic pathogens increase significantly after feeding raw foods.
So basically feeding an animal raw foods increases risk to itself, but also in contact animals and people. So this is the paper that has been published in 2000 in one of the papers published on the survival of salmonella. This is looking at salmonella, which were put into pet bowls and take home message is it is very, very difficult to get rid of.
And salmonella from bowls unless you're scrubbing and bleaching and scrubbing and bleaching, and most practises, most owners certainly do not do that type of cleaning of their utensils. So any raw food that is carrying infection is likely to be in the environment for quite some time. Some of the some of the organs I put on this list might be a surprise to you.
So these are I've recently reviewed the foodborne infectious agents that we should be concerned about, and this is the list, it's still an abbreviated list, but it's still an important list. So Campylobacter, Clostridia, E. Coli, Listeria, mycobacteria, salmonella, toxoplasmosis, and then norovirus.
Possibly pseudoavia Sarjeski's disease, and you might be surprised to see on this list avian influenza and Ebola, but I'll share some information with you on that later. The thing to remember is whilst we are living in the United Kingdom and we have quite stringent regulations on slaughterhouses and production of manufacture of pet foods, we actually now live in a global meat market and according to Wed Swift, you can see we are importing into Europe and into the UK fish and food, beef, mutton. Poultry from oil and pork from all over the world and so what we buy in the shop, we cannot assume has been subjected to the same stringent meat hygiene as we would expect in this country.
And I was even surprised to find that there are considerable illegal imports of meat, bush meat from Africa, for example, which raises huge potential possibilities if we feed that undercooked to animals. So let's look at some of them. First of all, bacteria.
Well, the Food and Drug Administration in America have for a long time issued public health warnings about handling and using raw raw diets, and in fact they say to prevent infection with salmonella and Listeria monocytogenes, it's best if you don't feed your pet a raw diet, and they, they cite high risk groups that should never handle them, and that's children under 5, the elderly, pregnant women, and people with a weakened immune system. In the UK, food poisoning is a really major issue at the moment. It affects over 1.7 million people a year, and that's these are the only people who report food poisoning to the GP and that it gets logged.
So there are a lot more cases than are actually reported. 22,000 people admitted to the hospital every year and 700 people a year die. Campylobacter is the most common foodborne pathogens over 280,000 cases and over 100 deaths a year.
Clostridium perfringenss is another common one, and norovirus is the third one, and I know some of you may even suffer with that over the last few months because there's been quite an outbreak. In fact, my local hospital here has got an outbreak going on at the moment. Salmonella is the pathogen that causes some some of the most serious hospital admissions and most deaths over 200, and E.
Coli is responsible for nearly as many admissions. There are other foods like cucumbers, for example, which can carry some of these agents, but by far the most important and common one is poultry meat, which is why there's such a big effort going on at the moment. So the Food Standards Agency in conjunction with the industry and with the National Health Service are trying to work together to reduce the amount of Campylobacter in the environment, and all of you will have.
Seen on television advertising about the dangers of poultry, raw poultry, and also on radio they had a big campaign talking to people about how you need to be diligent washing hands and other things to try to contain Campylobacter from chicken, and the reason is in this, study, which they randomly sampled chickens from all over the UK, even the best supermarket chickens, 64% of them are carrying Campylobacter. It's a massive problem, health problem for humans. And in New Zealand, a study was conducted where they looked at 50 samples of raw meat pet diets, acquired from supermarkets and pet stores, and they tested for Campylobacter.
42%, sorry, beg your pardon, 20, 42% of diets were positive for Campylobacter, and over half of them with the strain that's most commonly associated with illness in humans. The chicken we know is one of the most common ingredients given to pets in raw foods. So it's a very simple mathematics.
If a million dogs are fed raw chicken meat daily, 365 million raw chicken meals are fed a year. Based on the lowest incidence of Campylobacter, which is 64%, that means at least 2 233 million doses of Campylobacter are going to be given to dogs in a year. How many of them will develop disease?
Maybe not that many, but a considerable number will. How many in contact people will become infected and develop disease where we don't know. How many of the dogs that are given those raw chicken meals will be on antibiotics for various ailments, and how many affected dogs will be treated with antibiotics?
Because Campylobacter is already very resistant to most antibiotics. And so the activity of feeding raw chicken meat to to dogs on a big scale is going to increase the risk of antibiotic resistance developing. And DFA had funded a study which was reported in 2009 when they looked at the zoonosis, foodborne zoonoses, and their conclusions were there was a high prevalence of Campylobacter in dogs in the UK, and it was up to 70% in some kennel dogs and dogs in kenels and hunt kennels, the overall zoo at risk that they considered was greater than in an average household.
And they also found that Clostridium jujuni isolate where the same clonal complexes as commonly found in humans. In other words, there is cross. And fertilisation from pets to people and vice versa of these different pathogenic organisms.
I'll talk about freezing again later, but studies that have been conducted show that freezing chicken can reduce, but not eliminate Campylobacter. Clostridia Clostridia peringens is commonly found on raw meat and poultry in the USA, it causes about a million cases of foodborne illnesses, and there are between 2 and 32 reported outbreaks involving up to 750 individuals every year in the UK and it does vary from year to year, and seed difficile has been found in raw meat intended for pet consumption and in ground beef beef products in Canada, France, and, and elsewhere. The other thing about Clostridia is not just the active organism, as you know, the the putrification, if you have a meat source which is not protected by cooking or or in some other way, it can putrefy and post it can produce spores and botulinum toxin.
I have actually seen a few cases of botulism and fortunately they will survive, but it does, it's quite alarming when you see paralysis. And of course, freezing does nothing to affect spores or toxins from other other bacteria. And in fact, the use of antibiotics in treating pets with infection has been implicated as a factor in the development of antibiotics.
E. Coli, we're all familiar that E. Coli is a common, a common organism which isn't always pathogenic, but some forms are very pathogenic.
So symptoms can range from nothing, it can be absolutely asymptomatic right through to serious bloody diarrhoea, abdominal pain, and death. And there's one subgroup of E. Coli which are of particular concern to us the ones who are looking at animals being fed raw, and that's the enterohemorrhagic E.
Coli, because this is the main cause of renal failure in young children because it causes acute kidney damage. In Europe, it's it's estimated at 1.3 cases per 100,000 population, which is quite high, and it's undercooked ground beef products, which are the important source of this particular foodborne infection.
Also at Liverpool they were looking at feeding raw to dogs and they found that feeding raw was a risk factor associated with the carriage of E. Coli resistance to antibiotics which and they're resistant to antibiotics like the latest . Blank, ones which we'd like to use in humans, but obviously this is not a good thing to happen.
And this photograph is distressing, and it's a child. It's one of two from Dorset that were hospitalised during a recent outbreak of humanlytic uremic syndrome, complication of E. Coli.
And in this outbreak, 30 people were eventually seriously affected and hospitalised. 10 of them were children. And in the initial case, the same strain of E.
Coli was found in animal faeces in the garden, and by the end of the outbreak, two cats in different households had the same E. Coli strain as the people who were infected. Now they don't know.
My understanding is they still don't know what the actual source of this E. Coli was. It's an E.
Coli which is usually associated with beef, but what it does demonstrate is that this organism can move between. Owners and families and pets, and we don't know in this case whether the people got infected first and passed it on to animals or whether the animals got infected first and passed on to people or whether they both got infected simultaneously, but it doesn't really matter. The point is this is a sort of serious outcome that can occur if an And a person does contract one of these pathogenic organisms, and the issue is if you recommend refeeding raw and a person subsequently becomes ill or dies as a direct result, you would be liable in some way legally for making that recommendation.
Now, the FDA recommends not feeding more because of Listeria. Now most of you and I have never seen Listeria in a pet, and the reason is simple. In dogs and cats, Listeria infection usually just causes trans in vomiting, diarrhoea, and a fever, and we don't normally work those cases up.
In humans, however, Listeria monocytogenes in particular can cause meningitis, sepsis, and serious complications during pregnancy. In the USA, 24 confirmed outbreaks, not just individual cases of outbreaks were reported in the 10 year period, and it actually has a 10% mortality rate, which is really high. In the UK, the latest figures I could get showed that mysteriosis in people ranged from 148 to 226 cases, and most are occurring in at-risk people.
So healthy people might not be too effective to come into contact with, but people over 60 and pregnant women are definitely at risk. And Listeria is an issue. Well it is.
In this study, NEMSA, they looked at 576 pet food samples, and what they found was 11% were positive for Listeria, which is more than 1 in 20, and more than 120 those were Listeriumnocytogens, which is a very serious one, and all of them were in raw foods or jerky dried treat type food, and also in this study, 15 were positive for salmonella. In America, they routinely survey, pet foods, and they tested, the two batches from a different, two different batches from a raw pet food company, which which they discovered Listeria and they were made to withdraw. The products from the marketplace.
As far as I'm aware, nobody is screening raw pet foods in the UK for Listeria. I may be wrong, but as far as I know, nobody is. The legal obligation in this country is that the foods are tested periodically for enterobacter AC.
And I put mycobacter TV in here because in 2013 in Newbury there were 9 cases of M bovis infection in domesticated cats, and 2 people in contact with the cats were found to have active TB infections. So that means if cats get TB from any source, people are at risk of contracting it from them. And in this outbreak, I don't believe the source of infection was known, but actually it was an area where cattle were infected.
And cats can be infected by drinking or eating byproducts from infected animals. So we should not be feeding raw meat from cattle, which could be infected with TB, . To to cats because of the potential risk for humans to pick up the infection from cats.
Now everyone knows about salmonella. There are numerous reports of dogs getting salmonella. An individual animal that gets acute gastroenteritis isn't normally worked up to the nth degree.
It's where there are groups affected where it's more likely people will try to find out the source of infection. And so there are papers looking at sled dogs, groups of racing greyhounds and guard dogs, and pet dogs though, where salmonella was demonstrated to be due to consumption of contaminated raw meat. In America, very serious outbreaks have occurred in humans from handling dried pig's ears in particular or just handling dogs who had been given these treats and so we know salmonella is a problem and there's a paper in the UK where they looked at imported dry hide treats, and they found that a considerable number are carrying serious pathogenic salmon salmon strains.
In this study, Josh looked at 10 dogs fed homemade raw foods and 10 dogs fed commercial dry food, and 30% of the the dogs fed homemade were shedding salmonella in the faeces. In another study, a single salmonella contaminated a commercial was contaminated previously frozen raw meat. I'll come back to freezing again in a minute, and they were found to be shedding the bacteria in the faeces for up to 11 days, although they were healthy, and this is the issue.
Animals can be carrying salmonella and be perfectly healthy, but they're still shedding it and it still presents a risk to people in contact with them. And there are lots if you go on the internet, that's just another one, lots of cases. This is a case where a child and a dog in the same household were infected with salmonella.
In 2016, in November, Nature's menu in the UK recalled a batch of one of their foods after after it's been distributed to retail outlets because it was contaminated with salmonella. So this is not something that happens in America only. It's not something that never happens over here.
This is a real issue that we have. This is a child. This is Noah Creighton.
He's recovering in Arizona in intensive care. He got severe salmonella infection that infected his brain in 2013. Now in this case, they were not only were they able to trace the salmonella back to raw chicken, they were able to trace it back to the actual farm it came from by PCR, and they were able to say it came from a group called Foster Farms chicken.
Me, I don't want this on my conscience. I could not recommend feeding raw to any animal knowing that the potential was there for a young child to become brain damaged or in the case of E. Coli, have kidney damage as a result of contact with organisms that were being fed to the animal.
And toxoplasmosis, obviously this is a protozoan, which we all know, can infect most warm blooded animals and about 350 cases a year in England Wales. All of the hosts are not definitive hosts. The others are intermediate hosts of the cat is the definitive host.
Where the cats get toxoplasma from? Well, it has to be from eating meat, but it often can be prey, of course, or it could be other ingested ways. In a, in a recent study, it was only published 2017, the UK government found a strong association between eating beef and toxoplasma infection.
And in the USA, a similar study found it was especially associated with eating undercooked pork, lamb, and venison. So dogs and cats fed raw food at a higher frequency of this disease and exposure as to captive exotic animals. And once shared, Trondii can survive in the environment for at least 6 months.
So it's known that the risk to humans is highest from handling or ingesting raw meat and contact with the oy that's shed by the definitive host, which is the cat. Obviously good hygiene, we all know about that, about training women not handling litter trays, about cleaning hands and so on and so forth, but they do remain in the environment for months, and this is one of the organisms because it's actually a . Prozone that can be killed by freezing, but at -12 for at least 24 hours.
So this is 11 of the organs which can cannot survive freezing. And finally, I just want to finish on viruses. There are some viruses out there which we never even think about in small animals like hepatitis B, but this is transmitted via pigs, wild born deer, rabbits, and rats, and has been transmitted from animals to people, and it has really serious consequences and 25% of pregnant women who are infected go on to develop liver failure and result in loss of life to both mother and baby.
Norovirus is now break at the moment in humans in this country, and the evidence now is that dogs can get norovirus and can share norovirus with owners. So it's one of the commonest causes of GI disease at the moment in this country, and transmission has actually been been confirmed. Pseudo rabies, Ajey disease, well, of course, herpes virus isn't common here, but it does affect other mammals.
It's usually fatal except in people and in dogs it can be transmitted by eating infected pork or offal, whether, whether there are any cases of it being transmitted from dogs that have eaten it or cats to humans is unknown, but it can be spread by aerosols. So if a dog or a cat became infected, it could be passed on. I was very surprised to find that this report of a case of avian flu in a person in a veterinarian in New York in December 2016, basically a group of over 100 cats caught contracted avian influenza across some shelters in New York City.
And I'm not sure that they know where the infection came from, but certainly this it was proven that the statinary surgeon contracted it from one of the cats that died from this infection. In the outbreaks, previous outbreaks in 2004, captive tigers fed fresh chicken carcasses started to die in a Thai zoo, and in fact, 147 to 441 died of infection or euthanas. And the other outbreaks that came out at that time, including domesticated cats in Thailand and domesticated cats in Germany, and in all the cases they investigated, it's emerged that the cats had actually become infected by eating raw meat contaminated with bird flu, not through other roots which they could have been infected from other cats by an aerosolal flu faeces or whatever.
The evidence was that they had actually contracted avian flu by eating infected meat. So feeding infected raw poultry meat to cats would present a potential risk to humans in the face of an outbreak of serious avian flu. And finally, Ebola, which has had a recent outbreak in Africa which threatened to break out of Africa.
It's associated with butchering and processing meat from infected animals and in fact in the latest outbreak in 2013, child er, the first child which died, lived in a family that hunted and bats and cow which carry the known to carry the Ebola virus. I was surprised to find that every year over 75,000 tonnes of bush meat is illegally imported into Britain, and this obviously presents a huge risk to pet populations if this meat is undercooked and is fed to pets. So of course at the moment the risk is extremely low, but it doesn't mean that in the future it won't become a serious issue.
And finally, multiple drug resistants, there are lots of papers now, some of them on the screen showing about the transmission of multiple drug resistance between people and humans and bacterial colonies, and at Liverpool University they've found that feeding raw meat to dogs was a serious risk factor associated with E. Coli resistance antibiotics, including the cephalosporin. And 31% of dogs on raw diets were carrying resistant E.
Coli compared to 4% of dogs on cooked meat diets, which is a significant difference. So let's summarise, commercially prepared pet foods, legally there is absolutely no difference in the basic ingredients that can be included in any pet food, whether it's raw or cooked, marketed in the UK. So there is no difference in the content.
The only difference between feeding raw and feeding up a commercially cooked food is the fact that it's cooked. Both cooking and freezing alter nutrient contents and availability in raw ingredients, and, but obviously only cooking and radiation or pasteurisation are reliable methods for killing bacteria. So the question that a lot of people who are manufacturing law seem to be saying to people is they're saying that, well, don't worry because freezing the food kills the pathogens, but these organisms E.
Coli, Listeria, salmonella, Campylobacter, Clostridia, norovirus, and bird flu vice are not killed by freezing raw meat. So the indisputable evidence is that raw foods, raw meat foods in particular, carry potentially life threatening pathogens. Pets eating raw foods can become ill themselves, and they shed pathogens into the environment.
Serious illnesses and deaths have been confirmed to have been contracted from handling raw foods or hide treats and from handling dogs fed raw. Confirmed transmission between humans and pets in families have been reported, and encouraging feeding raw will naturally expose. People and pets to potentially life threatening infections.
Based on the current evidence as I can see it, it is reckless, irresponsible, and probably unethical for the veterinary and veterinary nurse and allied professions to recommend feeding raw diets to its clients because of, yes, concerns about nutritional adequacy and health risks to pets and health risks to humans, health risks to humans in contact with the pets in their environment. And the increased risk of microorganisms developing multiple drug resistance and transfer to humans, which flies in the face of all the efforts everyone's making under the One Health initiative and also the NHS and FSA attempts to reduce risk of foodborne disease. What is the actual significance of the study, Liverpool study on shedding and oral pathogens and dogs fed raw?
It doesn't matter how much you educate clients, we cannot stop dogs licking at risk people or people stroking them. And what we need, because we don't know the true incidences of these transmissions, we need more collaboration between the medical and vetting professions because it's almost certainly a gross underestimation of the number of zoonotic cases that we're seeing at the moment. My prediction is that the current fat to feed raw to pets will fall into disrepute when a child dies as a direct result of an infection contracted from raw pet food or a dog or cat-fed contaminated raw food.
My question to anyone who's listening to this who's still pro raw, and I know advocates will not be swayed by any argument if you all know that raw foods carry potential serious pathogens. Question Do you eat raw, fresh chicken or other meats daily? If so, in my opinion you're crazy.
If not, how can you justify it's safe to feed to a pet? And you have to be concerned about high risk people who might handle a pet shedding those organisms and your potential liability if they get ill and you recommended this pet. I'm happy to take any questions.
For, for Mike. Or for . Myself, Anthony Chadwick, I didn't really introduce myself at the beginning.
I'm the founder of the webinar vets, so we've . If I'm also a vet as well, but I noticed we've got some superstars in today. I'm really .
I don't always do this, but I love the fact that Des is here. Well he might have gone, but he was in. Des Thompson was in, .
We've also got, John Gay, who I love. He, he does these most brilliant, bird pictures. So good to see you as well, John, and Zoe is in.
There's, there's loads of, people just before, while people are having a think of questions, you know, obviously, I think it was last year, Mike helped us with, One of the talks at the virtual congress, I think it might have been, might have been two years ago, it might have been the, the keynote on geriatric medicine. We're running the virtual congress again, 19th, 20th, 21st. Rich can put some links in the chat box, but If you're a BVA member, you get Friday for free anyway.
We're doing cardiology and then very interestingly, Mike, we're gonna be talking about from field to fork to, no, from field to fork. And we'll be talking about things like antimicrobial resistance. That looks a really fascinating session that the BVA have helped us to put together.
In the evening, we've got the Royal College Mind Matters Initiative, which is available to everybody who's involved in veterinary, in the veterinary profession industry, be you a vet, a nurse, a kennel maid, somebody who works for a pharmaceutical firm, somebody who works for a veterinary insurance company, all about finding your purpose and passion. Jenny Goyat a fantastic vet who's also a veterinary coach. Jen Brant who is the head of well-being at the American Veterinary Medical Association, and Rachel, who won one of the Spis, well-being awards, the inaugural awards in January of this year.
So, I'm hopeful that if you're not already registered for that, do come along to the, the bits of the free content. But of course, it's also fabulous on the Saturday, that's our midnight to midnight. Everything is recorded, so you can watch it at your leisure.
And I know ticket prices are still cheaper for platinum. They will be going up on about the 15th of Jan, but, we can pull rich in. Just to confirm that, put, put the, the links in as well.
For the first day we're moving the conference into Sunday, which is just gonna be a large animal, and equine day. So if any of you are interested, In the the large animal as well, . Then there's all various bits of pricings in there.
If you're not sure of anything, Richard at the webinar vet.com is probably the person to speak to, and those recordings are available for 12 months after the the actual event as recordings. I do hope we're gonna get a little bit of controversy here, although we might just all be really kind of agreeing with you, Mike, so we'll see what happens.
John, the Birdman, Gay has just a brilliant talk. Thanks for that, John. Hopefully we'll get to see you again.
We might be coming down to Exeter in a month or two, so hopefully we can, meet up. I got a, a telescope. You'll be pleased to hear, John, for, my last birthday, so I'm getting very keen.
Using that for the birds. Debbie is saying, is there any way to get a copy of the domestication of dog's image? Yeah, actually that that image, and there are several similar type images are actually available if you just go on the internet, you can find them.
And there are there are papers as well that have been published. So what, what should we Google search for Mike to find that wolf dog in evolution, it'll come up in images. There are several similar types of representations, but don't go too far back in age though, because there's been new information in the last few years.
So yeah, you want to get one of the latest ones and that's one, yeah. Great, OK. .
All right, have we got any other questions? What, what's people's general, general thoughts? Is, has that been a useful webinar?
How much trouble do you get in in the surgery? Do you have a lot of people who are You know, pro raw diet who are coming in to see you, who are quite evangelical about it. You know, you yourself are you .
An advocate of of raw bones and, and raw diets, or are you somebody who thinks, not a great idea. Debbie's just said we recommend raw bones for dental health in practise, should this be stopped? Yeah, yeah, well, the short answer is, does it help dental health?
Yeah, there is evidence that if you give raw bones with sinewy bits on that dogs chew. In fact, some of the early papers which looked at the canned food versus so-called dry foods, which are where people have been claiming ever since that dry foods are better for dental health than canned foods, they're wrong. Those diets were written in German and they were mistranslated, so the fact that it was hard foods they were feeding and it was raw, it was ox tails that were feeding, and they found that the dogs chewing on the oxtails did floss the teeth so did reduce in you know plaque accumulation and so on so the misconception that dry is better than cans for dental plaque buildup is absolutely incorrect.
It was hard foods and when it was translated, it translated hard food into into dry food, but in the context of what we're talking about today, which is disease risk, absolutely raw bones do carry pathogenic infections which can be transmitted. So, you know, there is a risk associated with that. So I personally wouldn't recommend it.
Right, let's have a look. We've got an anonymous attendee saying most people are pro raw and anti-veterinary prescribed diets, for example, hills with grain content cited as the most common reason for not feeding it. Well, Yeah, well, I've recently reviewed all the literature on the grains, and in fact it was published in the Times last year, and there are a very small subset of dogs that do have a potential problem with gluten, so they have a gluten sensitivity.
It isn't identical, but it's similar to celiac disease in people. But we're talking about a very few, very few dogs. In fact, most of the, most of the publications have been from a single family of Irish settlers in this country, which Roger Batter I remember used to have at London.
And so it's an inherited issue. The fact is, though, any animal that has a problem with gluten, if you then stop giving gluten, the clinical signs and everything go away. So we don't need to have a global anti-grain or anti-gluten, you know, campaign because it's not necessary because it's such a rare, a rare condition that they have.
I mean, certainly from a dermatology perspective, when you're looking at, you know, Food allergy or or food intolerance, actually, you know, grain is. Is rather rare. It's usually more meat like things that people are or dogs are intolerant or allergic to.
Yes. First of all, true dietary allergies are not that common anyway. They're overdiagnosed, and secondly, wheat is quite a long way down the list.
It's certainly a lot further down the list than beef and meats. So, so, it's not an argument to feed raw because you want to avoid grain for allergies. Yeah.
It's, it's interesting to say most people are pro raw and anti veterinary prescribed diets, presumably person. I doubt whether most people are pro raw, who are, who are, . Owners, I would think it's a small subset, isn't it?
Well, it depends on who we're talking about. If we talk about the general veterinary population, I think that thing's not true. But if we talk about the general public, I'm not sure where we are with that now.
I went to a championship dog show back end of last year, and it was a toy dog breed show, and I was really surprised. We only found one breeder who wasn't feeding raw in some form or other because they thought they ought to. And a large number of those breeders did think grain was bad and raw was good.
So it's certainly in the breeder environment, that statement might be true. I don't think it's necessarily true for the whole, well, obviously general public, and I don't think it's true for veterinary surgeons, but it is a growing, growing popular opinion which is a myth it's a perception and it's incorrect and it's inaccurate and really we need to have more people looking at the evidence and talking out against these these perceptions because they're not true. Great, OK.
I think that, let me just see if we've got a few more. Oh, go on, we're, we're getting a few more in there, . The anonymous attendee said, I'm involved in dog agility, that community is really pro raw and I'm always fighting against it.
Ian has said people who want to feed their dogs and catch raw food diets tend to be fanatics. The points Mike raised are obviously excellent points, but equally, obviously, they don't apply to them because we, they just don't, which is evangelical, . People don't always get the other side of the argument once they've decided that they are going to be one way or the other.
They probably stay that way, don't they really? It's hard to convince them otherwise. And they do, and, and, and really it shouldn't be a case of trying to convince them because you know immediately if you're not going to succeed in convincing them, but what we need to do is make sure that, make sure they know the facts, make sure that they understand the risks.
And certainly separate ourselves from endorsing such a practise. And in America now, a lot of practises now first they're doing lots of things. First of all, they do make a note now about what animals are eating when it comes to surgery.
Animals that are fed raw are kept in isolation. If they're admitted into the hospital, they're potentially shedding salmonella and such like into the environment which can be difficult to get rid of, so you don't want to. You could be at risk if you put other animals at risk by knowingly allowing an animal being fed raw onto your premises and getting an outbreak of salmonella in your own premises, and that's one issue.
The other issue is, if there were any consequences, so a lot of practises in America now is getting people to sign a disclaimer. What they do is they give them either tell them or give them an information sheet and then get them to sign a document to say that. I feed my dog raw and I have been told the information about the risks associated with that, and they, and that that then at least means that you've done your job.
If they then go away and feed it, there's nothing you can do about that fully aware of the issues because when I spoke to the breeders at the at the dog show, when I said you know about the risks of feeding raw, all they could think of was feeding bones. None of them knew about the risks of infection transmission or that some of these infections can be really serious. None of them knew that, but they all thought, and they all thought raw was beneficial, but they couldn't really tell me any scientific basis for it.
So we need to educate them. It's education and hope that they, they will, you know, take our advice, but of course a lot of them won't unfortunately. Fantastic, Mina, I will leave it up to you to close.
Mina is, I don't know whether Catherine has told you, Mina, you are our top international vet for doing CPD, so we will be sending you a certificate, Richard. I don't know if that's been done yet. If it hasn't Mina, you can be expecting that coming.
Mina says in California, people believe that the raw is the best, and PETco sells raw food, but they are still in the minority, so, . You know, obviously. There's, it's deemed, I suppose, as being natural, isn't it?
That's its selling point. Yeah, but, is it natural? I mean, I think the question I asked at the end is if anybody who's going to recommend feeding or is prepared to eat raw fruit meat themselves the same as they give the dog.
Yeah, good luck. I think the thing is it's safe for them, why do they think it's safe for the dog. I think the thing is, Mike, you know, if, if you kill something and you immediately eat it, you've probably got less chance and obviously things like pork and chicken not so good.
But often these are older meats, aren't they as well, so it's, you know, it's different from it, like a, you know, a wolf killing something, a wolf is eating. To think that wolves are healthy. Anyone who watched that programme where the man lives wolves, you know, they might, they are living on the edge all the time.
They are barely surviving with what they're eating. They're not healthy animals. Well they're, you know, and they probably don't live to be 1516, like, you know, dogs that are well looked after by their owners, but anyway.
Fantastic, thank you so much, Mike, it's it is one of those interesting . Areas just to, to be looking at and Yeah, absolutely. I think I would, I would, I would hate to think that this is going to continue growing until there is a tragic outbreak in people.
Yeah, of course. Somebody contacted me recently who works in a charity where they take dogs into intensive care, high-risk areas in hospitals. And the question was.
Should these animals be fed raw, and the answer is absolutely not. No, of course. Well, that makes it even more risky, doesn't it?
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Mike. Thanks everyone for listening.
I hope 2018 is a great year for everyone. Do have a little look at the virtual congress, . Webinars and so on.
Some of that is free. Finding your purpose and passion, should be really good if you're a BVA member, as I say, you get the Friday bit free. But hopefully we can see some of you on the Saturday and Sunday if you have not already got your tickets.
So already several 1000 coming, but it'd be great to see you there. Take care. Speak to you soon.
Bye bye.
