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This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

There's a mysterious respiratory illness harming dogs, and veterinarians aren't sure what it is or what it means for our pets.

Today, Johns Hopkins veterinarian Megan Davis talks to Stephanie Desmond about atypical canine respiratory disease, why we don't yet know what's causing it, and how scientists are working to discover the culprit.

Let's listen.

Megan Davis, thanks so much for joining me.

It's a pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

So today, I want to talk to you about this mysterious respiratory illness in dogs.

So first of all, what is it and what are we seeing?

That's a great question. So right now, we don't quite know exactly what it is or if it isn't it, but it's being called atypical canine

respiratory disease. And it appears to be potentially a little bit worse on the West Coast and was really a lot of the cases

that we've been seeing have come out of Oregon. But now we've had reports of mysterious illness

in multiple states. What seems to be a little bit unusual is sometimes the speed with which dogs become very sick very quickly.

So having disease like a cough, which is what we have associated the most with this disease,

can also be seen in a lot of other fairly routine illnesses that dogs get like kennel cough,

which is caused by Bordatella.

And so having a cough in and of itself doesn't necessarily mean that a dog has this particular

syndrome. And what's happening is that some dogs become really, really sick and some may die.

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