Air Pollution Dog Blog — dog health issues

If you think you have COVID-19, it might be best to stay away from your pets, says the author of a Dutch study that found a surprising number of dogs and cats may be getting infected.

"About one out of five pets will catch the disease from their owners," said Dr Els Broens of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, although there are no known cases of the disease spreading from pets to humans.

"Luckily, the animals do not get very ill from it."

In Broens' study, presented this week in a paper at the European Congress of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, 156 dogs and 154 cats from 196 households were tested in homes where humans were known to have had a coronavirus infection.

Read more

Many pet owners are asking questions about the safety of a dog wearing an air filter face mask. Can a dog wear an air filter mask? Is it safe? What are the warnings? What are the benefits? These are important questions with increasing air pollution problems from wildfire smoke, desert dust, volcanic ash, red tide, and mold from hurricanes. 

Do Air Filter Face Masks for Dogs Exist?

Yes, K9 Mask® launched a Kickstarter campaign in March of 2019 for the first production of an air filter mask for dogs. The campaign was fully funded and the first masks were produced in the summer of 2019. All of this happened before the coronavirus pandemic. K9 Mask® by Good Air Team first saw the need to protect dogs from wildfire smoke in California. After the destruction caused by the Camp and Paradise wildfires in 2018 they knew something had to be done to solve the problem of air pollution affecting pets.

Read more

Read more

No one wants to hear news about a coronavirus. We are tired of it. But, the more we know the better we can try to live. This news comes from Malaysia where scientists have connected a coronavirus in dogs that might be transmitted to humans.

In the past 20 years, new coronaviruses have emerged from animals with remarkable regularity. In 2002, SARS-CoV jumped from civets into people. Ten years later, MERS emerged from camels. Then in 2019, SARS-CoV-2 began to spread around the world.

For many scientists, this pattern points to a disturbing trend: Coronavirus outbreaks aren't rare events and will likely occur every decade or so.

Read more

In California, raging wildfires seem to appear like clockwork every summer and fall, damaging property, claiming people's lives, and polluting the air we breathe. What was once traditionally the “wet season” is no longer immune from bouts of dangerous fire weather. California’s wildfire season is expanding, and weather changing climate is a leading cause.

Wildfire Season in California 2021

This week's unusually early Red Flag Warning is just a sign of things to come, according to California's top emergency and fire officials, who gathered for an event in the East Bay to kick of Wildfire Preparedness Week. With dry warm winds swirling above, California's top fire officials are sending a loud warning, that this upcoming fire season could quickly become the worst on record.

Read more