In The News

It’s estimated Americans own a whopping 78 million dogs and 85 million cats, according to the American Pet Product Association, but the downside of our love for animals is that every year tens of thousands of Americans will get sick from diseases spread between animals and people.

A Madison company that's working on a universal influenza vaccine has started a clinical trial using its vaccine to protect against a flu strain that doesn't match up. FluGen's vaccine is based on research from the laboratory of UW-Madison professor of virology Yoshihiro Kawaoka.

Even with the switch from rain to heat, mosquitoes that carry the West Nile virus may not emerge right away, said Tony Goldberg, an epidemiology professor at University of Wisconsin. “Rain is necessary for mosquitoes to breed because they breed in water,” Goldberg said. After heavy rains, it’s typical to see an increase in floodwater mosquitoes, commonly known as nuisance mosquitoes, Goldberg said. They’re bigger, can fly about 10 miles and love to bite, said Melaney Arnold, spokeswoman for the Illinois Department of Public Health. “They’re the ones that ruin your picnic,” Goldberg said. “If you’re sitting on a lawn in the middle of the day, (they) will fly right up to you, bite you and cause those big welts.”

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is home to a lab with one of the most unique libraries of specimens in the world. The Comparative Ocular Pathology Laboratory of Wisconsin, or COPLOW, houses 58,000 different tissue slides, blocks and whole organs from the ocular system of a variety of animals.

As mosquitoes and ticks travel into new territory, exposure to the diseases they carry increases. In 2016, more than 640,000 cases of vector-borne disease were reported nationwide, which is triple the number of cases in 2004. In roughly that same time period, nine new germs spread by bites from mosquitoes and ticks have been discovered or introduced in the United States. In this new reality, scientists, public health officials, industry representatives, and the public are asking how they can be better prepared to respond to ongoing cases and stop epidemics before they start. A new consortium led by Paskewitz and Lyric Bartholomay PhD’04, associate professor in the UW School of Veterinary Medicine, aims to provide answers.

Ultrasound can provide early diagnosis and a service opportunity for veterinarians, explains Theresa Ollivett of the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine.

The University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine proposes to spend $115 million to double the size of its small animal clinic and upgrade its large animal facilities. The expansion also would triple the laboratory space available for infectious-disease research.

In 2012, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine compared 3 medications—ABT-116, carprofen, and tramadol—with a placebo control for their relative therapeutic effect on osteoarthritis-associated pain of the hip joint in dogs.