Statistics for blindness caused by dog fouling

ISDW

Does anybody have any statistics for Ireland as to how many (if any) people have been blinded because of dog fouling?

I am not advocating irresponsible dog ownership, you should always pick up after your dog, but I can't find any statistics about if this has actually happened here.

kildare.17hmr

Years ago i saw a uk documentery about this, not nice and avaoidable in most cases

ISDW

kildare.17hmr wrote: »

Years ago i saw a uk documentery about this, not nice and avaoidable in most cases

The NHS in the UK say that due to advances in medicine, it is extremely rare, so if that is the case in a population the size that they have, I wondered what the situation is here.

As you say, totally avoidable, worming and cleaning up after your dog, and no problem whatsoever.

seamus

Probably something you'd need to ask the HSE about.

A quick search on the HSE website for "Toxocariasis" brings up a British publication which says that there are about 10 cases of Toxocariasis in the UK each year. Blindness resulting from toxocariasis is exceptionally rare, almost all of the time the person is cured without long-term damage.

So to extrapolate those to Irish figures, there is statistically less than one case of toxocariasis in Ireland each year. Blindness as a result of toxocariasis in Ireland is so rare that it effectively never happens, for all intents and purposes.

My gut feeling is that if you ask the HSE you will get a small double-digit figure for the number of toxocariasis cases ever recorded in Ireland, and no record of blindness from it in the last fifty years.

seamus

Actually I'm a good bit off.

Here's something to get your teeth into ISDW:

http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/39/2/173.full

A study on ocular toxocariasis in the Republic of Ireland. The publisher's email address is at the top of that, I'm sure he'd be happy to discuss it in detail with you.

It's not perfect because they asked for self-reports of the disease from the children's parents. What astonishes me the most is that 184 children were reported as having had this very specific condition, but when the researchers followed up, 173 were rejected as basically being wrong or unconfirmable.

Of the other 11, only 8 were confirmed actual cases, the other 3 were strongly suspected. They ran with the 11 as being "valid cases".

With such a small sample it's hard to draw definite conclusions, but generally what they found is that dog or cat ownership was not in itself a risk factor. A child with a pet was no more likely to contract the illness than their petless peers, and vice-versa.
However, there was a county correlation; so the incidence of the disease tended to "cluster" in areas where there were higher dog populations.

But the study seemed to indicate that the most outstanding risk factor was geophagia - eating earth. Children who ate dirt were more likely to become infected. They also found from soil samples, that the highest concentration of the parasite's eggs are found in home gardens.

The significantly higher level of geophagia reported in the ocular toxocariasis group (55.5%) than in either of the control groups (6.8% and 9.1%) or the entire survey population (7.8%) is clear (tables 2–4). The percentage of geophagia observed among the ocular toxocariasis cases is higher (55.5%) than that reported by previous US studies (41% [9] and 38% [10]). A statistical association between seropositivity and geophagia has been established [7, 14, 15]. The absent or weak association between ocular toxocariasis and exposure to dogs, but a significant association between ocular toxocariasis and geophagia recorded in the present study implies that the problem lies more with the type of human behavior that increases exposure than with the level of dog ownership. Previous studies in Ireland have shown that the percentage of soil samples that were positive for Toxocara ova varied from 8.3% in adventure playgrounds to 22% in neighborhood parks and 38% in domestic gardens [16, 17]. A geophagic child may therefore be particularly vulnerable to ingestion of Toxocara eggs under conditions in Ireland.

This doesn't indicate that dogs crapping in other peoples' gardens is the problem - the eggs can remain in the soil for years.

Cherry Blossom

seamus wrote: »

Actually I'm a good bit off.

Here's something to get your teeth into ISDW:

http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/39/2/173.full

A study on ocular toxocariasis in the Republic of Ireland. The publisher's email address is at the top of that, I'm sure he'd be happy to discuss it in detail with you.

Thanks for that link Seamus, because I never knew that study existed.

OP, I personally know the details of one the confirmed cases and the cause was cat faeces, not dog faeces. If you want all the specifics you can PM me.

ISDW

Thanks Seamus, definite food for thought.

Thanks AJ, I don't need to know the specifics, very sad that there has indeed been at least one case here, even if not from dog poo.

I really asked as I would like to be able to answer people with a little bit of knowledge if they started on about dog poo making people blind. It was just to have a bit of a defence I guess.

Delancey

I equate all the stories of dog poo blindness with the line that '' a swan with one flick of its wing can break a mans arm '' - anyone here know someone who had their arm broken by a swan ?