Blog love: Worms & Germs

How can you not love a blog with posts like Stupid things done with bats and Woman pecked by magpie loses leg and Cleaning up raccoon latrines? Worms & Germs is one creepy fascinating website. Smart, too: it's brought to us by the Ontario Veterinary College's Centre for Public Health and Zoonoses and the City of Hamilton Public Health Department, and the focus of the blog is zoonotic diseases. [Check out their Resources page.]

Today the W&G post is about dog bites. Excerpt:

A study was recently published in the Veterinary Record (O'Sullivan et al, 2008, volume 163) describing 234 dog bites in people in Ireland. Dog owners and victims of dog bites were interviewed to characterize the incidents. Bites were divided into 2 categories: bites to the dogs' owner(s) and bites to someone who didn't own the dog. Here are some parts of the study that I found interesting:

*A large number of dog breeds were involved. The breeds most commonly involved in bites were also the most common breeds in the country, indicating that higher bite numbers for certain breeds were a reflection of the breed popularity, not a breed-associated propensity to bite.

Read the rest of the post here. Weird trivia: "24% of owners and 22% of non-owners were bitten on a Wednesday." Unreal. Forget BSL -- Ireland needs to ban Hump Day.

W&G now has a sibling-blog devoted to horses: EquID Blog. Thanks to Drs. Scott Weese and Maureen Anderson for coordinating these often cringe-inducing and always informative websites.