What is Brucellosis?

The cure for this disease (largely accepted as a preventable disease with better sanitation) can cause additional unpleasant symptoms for the patient while enduring the side-effects of antibiotics, specifically trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, a sulfa based medication.

Patients in oxygen-poor, toxic air, or high altitude environments can encounter prolonged recovery times and enhance the risk of complications. Eating other forms of uncooked foods, such as sushi, should be avoided after recovery to permit immune system and liver function to re-establish optimum resistance and avoid post-recovery infection requiring additional dependence on antibiotics.

Patients with a history of previous antibiotic treatments less than six months before this infection should be interviewed for unsanitary diets and health habits and be given counseling to find healthier cooking and eating styles and also discontinue co-habitation with animals if present.

@indemnifyme - You could still get it from eating meat though. But I still don't think you need to worry-as the article said, brucellosis isn't very common.

However, I have a friend who lives at her parents farm with her dogs. I think I'm going to be sure and ask her if the dogs and farm animals have been vaccinated for this. I've never heard of this disease before, so it stands to reason other people may not have either!

I'm glad this disease isn't normally life threatening, but it still sounds like it would be better to avoid it. I had mono when I was younger, and fatigue is one of the symptoms of that too. It can really affect your life, let me tell you!

Although, from reading this article, it sounds like most people aren't at risk for brucellosis. I don't have any dogs, cows, sheep, or goats, so I guess I probably shouldn't worry too much.

@Mor - I also heard that dogs can pass on this disease through their urine. This worries me, because I have four dogs, and I have seen them licking each other’s urine off of the grass before.

I am surrounded on three sides of my house by my neighbor’s cow pasture. I only hope that he vaccinates his animals, because my dogs go out there all the time and eat the manure.

I have read that there is no vaccine to prevent brucellosis in dogs. If they develop it, they may never show signs of having it if they have been spayed or neutered, which I guess is a good thing, because they could be considered a danger to the environment if they were proven to be infected.

My brother drank milk straight from the cow on a dare. His friends worked on a farm, and being a teen subject to peer pressure, he caved.

He wound up with brucellosis. He said he felt like he had the flu. He felt weak and sore all over, and he had fever. He woke up sweating profusely, and he got headaches, which he never gets.

When he visited his doctor, he told her about drinking the unpasteurized cow milk. She said that this made it very easy to diagnose him. She gave him a combination of antibiotics and told him to take them for six weeks so that the infection would not return once it had been eliminated. It took him about a month to start feeling better.

I had to research an article once on brucellosis in dogs. Unfortunately, one of the brucellosis symptoms in dogs is that it causes them to abort their puppies, which can be quite tragic.

The strange thing is, it is actually a sexually transmitted disease in dogs. It can also be picked up through blood, like with humans.

I guess I just never realized that animals could have sexually transmitted diseases as well. I don't think dogs have very many though, and brucellosis can easily be prevented from spreading that way by testing your dog and whatever dog he or she is being mated to before you let them do it.

Or better yet, you can spay or neuter your dog and not have to worry about it at all.

It can be tempting to eat local foods when you are traveling, and I certainly wouldn't discourage people from doing it.

But you have to do it sensibly. Most cultures have at least a few types of meals which involve cooking meat for a long time and if you have to eat something, you should eat these kinds of meals to avoid brucellosis and anything else which might be lurking in there.

As long as the food is thoroughly cooked and delivered piping hot to your plate, you should be all right. Of course, you have to watch the water as well, and the fruit and pretty much everything else. But the nastiest things are in meat, so watch that above all else.