Scout's Paw Tracks

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Web Site Review: Food and Drug Administration's Center for Veterinary Medicine

How many of you were aware of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) website for pets?  Probably not many people know of this site but it does exist.  How many of you have been fustrated by rumours or inaccurate information about recalls and products unsafe for pets?

Most people are concerned pet owners, handlers and breeders, that is not to say everyone cares but they are in the minority.  There are various useful sites with accurate information for all of us.  One of those sites is the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM). 

This site contains recall alerts, tips and information that impact a broad range of information useful to all of us.  They cover everything from dog food to adverse drug reactions.

Consumer fliers contain useful information posted by the FDA covering a wide spectum of subjects including why turtles are a dangerous pet for children, how to read pet food labels, and more technical fliers on “How the FDA regulates Veterinary devices.”

I would highly recommend bookmarking thier site and paying it occassional visits or better yet sign up for thier e-mail alerts and have news stories sent to your inbox.

How useful was this article what do you have to say on the subject?  Select the comments link below this article to let your opinion be heard.

Pedigree Database Updates

The German Shorthaired Pointer database has been updated with numerous new dogs and a continuation of the data clean up I have been performing over the past few weeks.  With over 6,600 records in the database we currently have about a 99.96% data accuracy rate.

I am always on the look out for pedigree’s to add to the database.  If you have a file you would like to send me you can send it to
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The goal is to have over 10,000 dogs in the database by years end with a 99.999% accuracy rate and to add 10,000 dogs a year in 2007, 2008, and 2009.

We do not plan to change the interface with the database but we do hope to add new features, specifically the ability to add records and validation links directly to the database.  Unlike many on-line pedigree database ours only includes German Shorthaired Pointers.

If you know PHP programming and MySQL and would like to help with this conversion please contact me.  Currently the application is CGI based.  The XML format can be located here.  This file is exported into XML format from Breedmate.  Breedmate is the application I use to store pedigree’s locally. 

The Web based version is from Alfirin Technologies.