Friday, January 20, 2017

Experimenting with Lacy.



We lost our last bun to E. Cuniculi. It's a single cell protozoan that infects their brains and kidneys and can cause a host of heath problems often resulting in death. Here.

Since our last girl was so young when she died we had a necropsy and found out a lot of stuff about this protozoan.  The doctor who performed the necropsy had also run a shelter and had started testing all the rabbits that came in. It was then we found out that probably half of house rabbits probably have it and people never know until they (the rabbit) gets sick. (if then) Testing is a wee bit pricey. So most people aren't going to test.

With Lacy, we decided to have her tested as soon as we could when she was a baby. I think we tested at 8 weeks. And of course she turned out to be positive. We decided to treat her even though she absolutely has no symptoms.

The whole thing is sort of new territory for my vet. I mean, usually people don't know until it's too late and nothing can be done. If then. Most will not pray for a necropsy to find out what happened. But my last girl was only five - so I was paying to find out what took her so early. Vets aren't even sure how effective treatment is.  They don't have enough research. Anyway....

Yesterday I took her in for her third blood draw. Her titer (infection) level had still been still rising.  But the whole thing is a little weird because she is non-symptomatic positive. But she's completely healthy.

This article is mostly for other rabbit owners who may run across this one day. All of my rabbits are going to get tested when they are babies now. If I can slow it down a little bit - that's what I am going to try. Some rabbits live very long lives with this illness. One of the longest living rabbits I've owned was positive or at least exposed. But other times it can take a healthy five year old bunny within days.

2 comments:

  1. Just a thought: if the testing regimen is subject to such a thing as a Herxheimer reaction, then the results would continue to look worse for a while before they start to get better ...

    Give whatever's working some more time to see if it's going to work well enough.

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  2. I'm not sure that applies to bunnies, and even if it did chances are likely you wouldn't be able to tell because they hide their illness. Right now is is non-symptomatic anyway. But thanks!

    I did wait longer this time to test her this time because we were traveling with her. Travel does stress them to a degree, so I wanted the results to reflect worse case.

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