The rising trend of feeding your dog a raw food diet has been creating quite a buzz lately. However, a recent study has found that multidrug-resistant pathogens can be found in some raw dog food, which poses a huge risk for humans.

Dr. Michele Drake discusses raw food diets and the risks in our latest video.

Read more on the raw food diet study here.

You can learn more about the American Veterinary Medical Association's (AVMA) Policy on Raw Food Diets for pets here.

Featured Quote:

The studies have always shown that most of the raw diets are contaminated with some pretty nasty bacteria, salmonella and E.coli, but now they've also found that many of these bacteria are resistant to antimicrobials and people can be exposed to them just through handling their pet

Video Transcript:

Hey everybody. It's Dr. Michele Drake and I'm here today with Moki who's really interested in the treats in my hand and I wanted to just talk to you about some safety concern we have with raw diets.

I know that this can be kind of a sensitive subject and we want everyone to have the ability to decide what's best for their pet, but we do at least want you to have the correct information. So we're going to have a link for you to access that's going to give you more information on the study that's gone on.

The studies have always shown that most of the raw diets are contaminated with some pretty nasty bacteria, salmonella and E.coli, but now they've also found that many of these bacteria are resistant to antimicrobials and people can be exposed to them just through handling their pet, obviously handling the food and then when they clean up the dog's stool, obviously as well. But the biggest thing is handling the food and then hailing your dog. These bacteria are not just present in these diets, but also that they're resistant to antibiotics and that's just like the worst type of bacteria we want to have our pet or our families exposed to.

So there's so many great diets out there that are cooked, that are fresh cooked, that are different forms of like killing bacteria diets, so we'd really like you to consider those as well. Certainly home cooking is certainly an option. There's all kinds of alternative feeding methods if you're not interested in feeding the basic commercial diets, we certainly appreciate and respect that and we'll help you with that all day long, but we'd like you to consider avoiding the broad diets or at least having the information before you make that decision.

So have a look at it and we're here. For more information, call the Drake Center.