Information For Clients
One cannot read James Herriot's series of books about veterinary
medicine in the years before World War II without reflecting
gratefully on how far veterinary medicine has come in the
diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease in the dog. Before
the war, a veterinarian had to watch helplessly as an animal died
of distemper, hepatitis, or even a bacterial infection. Now, we
seldom see a case of canine distemper, and those infected animals
we see have usually contracted the disease due to the owner's
neglect. We have conquered the canine distemper epidemic as surely
as polio was conquered at about the same time in humans. More
recently, parvovirus caused many deaths in the non-immune canine
population; however, a vaccine was quickly developed, and the
incidence of death due to this devastating virus has dropped
dramatically. Because of an educated public and readily available
vaccines, the incidence of viral disease in small animal practice
has decreased to low levels. Another frequent cause of death,
bacterial disease, is now usually arrested comparatively easily
with the wide spectrum of antibiotics available to us. We have
learned much about the control and elimination of genetic defects
through selective breeding, and leash laws. Responsible owners have
greatly decreased the incidence of animals killed by trauma.
Animals, like their owners, are living longer and longer.
For all these reasons, a good part of the veterinarian's canine
and feline practice today is the care of the geriatric animal. It
is not at all unusual to be presented with an animal that is ten to
twenty years old and whose health has been preserved relatively
well through frequent veterinary care. Many of these older animals,
however, are presented with a disease that we still cannot cure, at
least in many cases--cancer. Just as in man, the diseases of old
age in our pets are cancer, heart disease, and kidney failure.
Often, the veterinarian and owner is forced to sit by helplessly
and watch the demise of an animal with a tumor which has spread,
just as Herriot had to watch an animal die of a simple bacterial
infection. Why do we see so much cancer in our pets? Is the
incidence increasing?
Although it may appear to some that we hear much more about
cancer in animals now than we did in the past, the fact is that we
see more cancer because our pets are living longer due to the
excellent care they receive today, as well as to advances in the
prevention of infectious disease. Of course, veterinarians know a
great deal more about the diagnosis and therapy of malignant
disease in pets than they did fifty years ago; even fifteen years
ago, little about cancer therapy was being taught in most
veterinary schools. But we still lag far behind human medicine in
our ability to control or prevent malignancies. The purpose of this
introduction is to present briefly our current level of knowledge
about the incidence, diagnosis, and therapy of cancer in small
animals.
Oncology Links
Animal
General