I may be crazy but I feel like we shouldn't be giving medicine to animals with communicable diseases (unless the medicine reduces the chances of animal->human transmission). We're just reducing the effectiveness of these medicines over time.
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To some extent, maybe.
Although, it needs to be balanced against other options. I’m sure this list isn’t exhaustive but we have:
* Medicine
* Uncontrolled spread
* Somehow modify the animals’ behavior to spread illnesses less
* Wipe out infected animals
2 and 4 seem less than desirable. 3… I mean “herding cats” is an expression for a reason, right? They are not very obedient in general.
Is there a good option I missed?
Citation needed.
We ought to have learned after the Covid “herd immunity” policies that killed hundreds of thousands around the world, that infectious disease control should be grounded on actual research, and not on simplified world models.
Researchers currently recommend treatment.
They recommend treatment because the mandate is to keep the animals alive, not whether or not it's good long term for humans. Many doctors and vets though are against the mass use of antibiotics in industrial farming (literally as a prophylactic so they get the antibiotics just in case) but it's not having much of an impact it seems.
> the mandate is to keep the animals alive
By whom?
> mass use of antibiotics in industrial farming
This is a completely different issue. No one's doing mass prophylactic treatment against this fungus, and even if we treated every single cat in the world, there are 60 times more chickens. Industrial farming is on a completely different scale.
> doctors and vets
Unless they're citing research supporting their opinion, it's as irrelevant as any other non-specialist.
I think they meant to cull them
I understand, didn’t mean to imply they were suggesting herd immunity. But then you’ll have people not taking their cats to the vet because they don’t want them to be culled, increasing exposure and limiting our access to reliable data.
My point is, take this uninformed opinion that goes against the researchers’ recommendation for what it is: wrong.
Most people now treat pets as children, expensive surgeries even are commonplace. Good luck convincing them not to medicate their pet when a medicine for the disease exists