The Doctor’s Surgery

If cats and dogs were pills, they would probably have been banned a long time ago because of their side effects.

The World Health Organisation estimates that there are tens of millions of dog bites annually worldwide. There are 4.5 million in the United States alone, 885,000 of them requiring medical care, and 30,000 needing plastic surgery to repair the damage. Between 3 per cent and 18 per cent become infected. There are 59,000 deaths from rabies in the world a year and more than 58,000 from dog bites. Imagine a pill like that!

In Italy, one in about 5,000 people annually is bitten by a cat. In the US, about 16 per cent of people bitten by a cat (of whom there are 400,000 a year) attend hospital emergency departments.

Apparently, women are more likely to be bitten than men, presumably because women fondle cats more. Surely cats can’t be misogynists?

Bites are not the only hazard to health represented by dogs and cats. Dogs can spread worms, sometimes with serious results – as can cats – and they’re a reservoir for leishmaniasis.

And humans can catch toxoplasmosis from cats – particularly unfortunate if a woman is pregnant, with a small risk of abortion and stillbirth, and a smaller risk still of neurological problems such as hydrocephalus, microcephaly or mental retardation, as well as retinochoroiditis leading to blindness. Are domestic cats worth running the risk of even a single such case?

Let us not forget, either, cat scratch fever. Half of all cats carry the causative organism, Bartonella henselae, on their claws and in their mouths. The official figure for annual incidence in the US is 22,000 a year, but this is probably a considerable underestimate because the disease is often not recognised or tested for. The disease is not usually serious and is self-limiting, though untreated it may cause two months’ fatigue as well as lymph-node swelling.

However, in the debilitated and the immunocompromised, cat scratch fever can be serious. The National Library of Health in the US recommends that to avoid it one should not play roughly with cats. Surely this is illogical? To avoid it, one should not have a cat in the first place. This will obviate all risk, as well as preserve the birds in the garden.

During the confinement caused by COVID-19 – or should I say caused by governmental reaction to COVID-19? – the demand for cats and dogs worldwide has increased greatly, again according to the WHO. This is because humans easily grow fed up with one another and seek a being more on their wavelength; but it might mean, in turn, an epidemic of, or at least an increase in, dog and cat bites, not to mention all the other possible hazards to health.

I took an online test recently about dog and cat bites. Despite loving dogs and having had one for many years, I was surprised at the extent of my own ignorance. I did not know that the most frequent kind of dog-bite injury is a crush injury, because dog jaws are capable of exerting a very great pressure.

And to think that I used to play with my dog by letting him pretend to bite my arm! But at least I knew that the antibiotic to give in case of damage was ampicillin and clavulanic acid.

Let’s get things in proportion. In the US, there are an estimated 250,000 human bites a year (with men more at risk), and a quarter of all hand infections are caused by human bites. Human bites are bad because the human mouth is so full of bacteria and viruses.

My advice is to wash your mouth out with soap and water before you bite anyone, just as you do after you swear.