By Rick Rouan, The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS – The Franklin County Dog Shelter will reopen for adoptions Thursday, nearly two weeks after it closed its door because of a distemper diagnosis.
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County officials announced Wednesday that test results for 137 dogs have come back negative for distemper and that the problem has been contained.
“We can say with a great degree of confidence there is no distemper virus at this shelter,” said Erik Janas, deputy county administrator. “We are going to resume normal practice.”
About 35 dogs are expected to hit the adoption floor when the shelter opens at 11 a.m. today.
Adoptions stopped Sept. 9, six days after the shelter on Tamarack Boulevard in the Northland area received its first distemper diagnosis.
Distemper is a virus that is potentially fatal to dogs, with symptoms that mimic other, less-serious respiratory diseases. Some dogs still are recovering from a respiratory disease that was not distemper.
Two other dogs were diagnosed with distemper after the shelter closed, and a total of 99 dogs were euthanized either because they had distemper, showed severe medical symptoms of it or had behavior problems that wouldn’t allow them to be placed in isolation. The shelter was divided into two areas during the outbreak: one for dogs that had been exposed and another for new intakes.
Last Friday, the shelter announced it was working with veterinary schools at Ohio State University and the University of Wisconsin to test every dog in the shelter. Ohio State helped the shelter collect samples from the dogs and shipped them to Wisconsin, where tests were fast-tracked.
A total of 137 dogs were tested; none has distemper. The remaining dogs will not be tested, Janas said, because they had identification tags and could be picked up as lost dogs, were court holds or were shy dogs with a low degree of exposure.