Step # 5 One Stop Search (federated searching)

This is great for finding information from a variety of sources about a topic.  Some databases are very specific, such as Auto Repair, and a person needing to find out about how to repair a car would absolutely want this specific source, instead of taking a global view and getting too many incidental hits.  When the car needs new brakes, it’s not necessary to know how many cars may be selling, or colors they come in, or other incidental bits of irrelevant info.

I used “foxhounds” as a search and came up with 34 pages of found information, including listings in Novelist K-8 (1 hit), Prices 4 Antiques (8 hits), MEDLINE, and Historical New York Times (1,893 hits!). 

I was able to sort by simply clicking on the icon for “Hits.”  In clicking on the source with 41 hits (Health and Wellness Resource Center), I learned that “vector transmissions” of virus means that companion animals can pick up diseases other than what the common transmission normally is thought to be.  In one instance, a study of pit bulls showed that animals in a region were becoming ill with a disease that is normally transmitted through dog fights when the animal is bitten by a diseased dog.  In this survey, vets traced the vector path of occurance among dogs that were never in fights, which indicated that the newly infected animals became ill through another means than being bitten directly by another dog.  The method of infection turned out to be a flea!  Since my search was on “foxhounds”, my readers my wonder why pit bulls came up in the article.  The federated search located articles that included any mention of foxhounds. This particular article went on to mention that “limited involvement with leishmaniasis focused on infection in American Foxhounds, which was subsequently shown by investigators at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to be endemic in 26 states and southern Canada. ” The infection was of the same strain found in Europe 3 decades prior.  Evidence showed that the  cause of infection could be both perinatel and through dogs fighting, sugestions that the brown dog tick, Rhipacephalus sangineus, could be instrumental. And, although the sand flea was prevalent in the area where infection was known, there was no evidence linking the sand flea to infecting either human or dog.  Article citation:

Vector-transmitted diseases in companion animals: trends, risks, controls.(news)

Linda Marie Wetzel. DVM Newsmagazine.  April 2007 v38 i4 p10(2).Foxhound collectibles from hit Prices 4 Antiques: