Investigating the prevalence of Salmonella in dogs within the Midlands region of the United Kingdom

Preena Lowden, Corrin Wallis*, Nancy Gee, Anthony Hilton

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Background - The intimate relationship between dogs and their owners has the potential to increase the risk of human exposure to bacterial pathogens. Over the past 40 years, there have been several reports on transmission of salmonellae from dogs to humans. This study therefore aimed to determine the prevalence of Salmonella in the faeces of dogs from the Midlands region of the United Kingdom to assess exposure risk and potential for zoonotic transmission.
Results - A total of 436 apparently healthy dogs without diarrhoea from households (n = 126), rescue centres (n = 96), boarding kennels (n = 43), retired greyhound kennels (n = 39) and a pet nutrition facility (n = 132) were investigated for Salmonella shedding. Faecal samples were processed by an enrichment culture based method. The faeces from one dog (0.23 %; 95 % confidence limit 0.006 %, 1.27 %) was positive for Salmonella. The species was S. enterica subspecies arizonae.
Conclusion - This study showed that the prevalence of Salmonella from faeces from apparently healthy dogs from a variety of housing conditions is low; however, Salmonella shedding was still identified.
Original languageEnglish
Article number239
Number of pages6
JournalBMC Veterinary Research
Volume11
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 17 Sept 2015

Bibliographical note

© 2015 Lowden et al.
Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Funding: BBSRC for a CASE studentship

Keywords

  • salmonella
  • zoonosis
  • dog
  • epidemiology
  • prevalence

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