President Bush tugs on his dog!: Photo  DC ... [Yahoo! News: Strange News - AP] (Yesterday, a local DC news showed the president walking his doggie. The President walked with the dog and waved to the crowd: he accidentally stepped on the dog... it's hard to walk a dog and wave at the same time, especially if you're trying to look presidential... )

'Rabbit fever' alert to pet lovers throughout nation TX "State and federal health officials warned pet lovers Tuesday that prairie dogs could be carrying "rabbit fever," but no cases have been reported locally." Some 2000 prairie dogs,  (most originating  from the prairie land of South Dakota), were shipped by a Lewisville business to pet stores and became sick and died. Investigators  found they were carrying the deadly disease called tularemia or 'rabbit fever.' Some prairie dogs were distributed to "Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington, Mississippi and Nevada, as well as Belgium, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Italy, Spain, Thailand and Japan." "Last month, Texas health officials alerted Panhandle doctors and city officials to be on the lookout for "rabbit fever" after dead rabbits were found in Canada." "No human cases have been reported yet" in the Texas area; people can contract tularemia from contact with secretions from infected animals or through a bite or a scratch or rarely, from breathing contaminated dust... [The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal]

Scary stuff... Because the disease kills 60 percent of untreated victims, pneumonic tularemia remains a top bioterrorist agent.

"Nowadays when a mosquito bites, you gotta wonder, "Did I just get a deadly virus??" Dave Winer writes in Scripting News today; (We'll take precautions: in Maryland and DC, we have birds dropping dead on our streets, and we're using Deet like crazy and the dog's staying inside when the mosquitoes swarm... our dog has a way of fighting mosquitoes: he tries to bite them out of the air if they swarm around him. Dogs can get West Nile Virus too).

Related: July 19, 2002, Dog News article' Deadly disease confirmed at Martha's Vineyard. Twenty-two (22) cases of tularemia occured on the Island (Martha's Vineyard) since 2000, 17 of which were  pneumonic, the rarer form of the disease; normally, one or two cases occur statewide per year. Scientists will collect dog ticks and trap animals as part of an ongoing investigation.."