Raising awareness is good, but we also need to keep Alabama Rot in perspective, which can be difficult when it pops up under a newspaper headline
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It's a very rare disease. 78 confirmed cases in almost 4 years in a dog population of over 8 million makes it rarer than almost any other canine illness you can think of. Somebody in a dog group did a calculation a few days ago based on the UK dog population and assuming that most of them were walked once a day. I didn't follow the math, but it worked out that a person has a greater chance of winning the jackpot on the National Lottery than their dog has of contracting Alabama Rot on a daily walk.
There's lots of information out there about the disease, but not all of it is accurate. This is a good resource
http://alabamarot.co.uk/I'm in the New Forest and have continued to walk my dogs there every day since the disease was first identified here in 2012. I had a few qualms when there was a suspected case in a Labrador that's mainly walked on Canada Common, which is my usual haunt, a couple of months ago, but on balance I decided to continue as normal. I noticed a few of the regular walkers that I see were missing for a few weeks afterwards, but they all seem to have returned now. The Lab developed some suspicious lesions and her kidney readings were a bit suspicious when tested, but she didn't go into kidney failure and after a few days her kidney readings were normal and she recovered.
