This Month at Vetrica

10 July 2004

Latest News

This page contains the latest news from Vetrica and Vetrica OnLine. It updates at least monthly, and will also keep you up to date with the latest news about animal care and welfare.

An archive of previous months articles is also available.

Pet Passports

This month, the regulations governing Pet Passports came into effect. From now, if you want to take a pet (dog, cat or ferret) to another EU country, there should no longer be any need for complicated export documents, or separate rabies vaccination certificates. The Pet Passport should suffice.

Unfortunately, it's not quite as simple as that. Although the Passport itself stores all the relevant details about an animal, the different countries do still have different entry requirements. For instance, France requires rabies vaccination. Sweden doesn't (at least when travelling directly from the UK). On the other hand, Sweden does require a particular worming treatment on a particular day prior to travel.

This all means that exporting pets from the UK to Europe should be more straightforward (and it's a bigger industry than you might imagine); but if you want to take your pet on holiday to Europe, and return to the UK, then I'm afraid you still need to undergo the full rigors of the Pet Travel Scheme. All the Passport does is keep your pet's details in one convenient document, that should be recognised by all other EU countries.

For those that are unfamiliar with the Pet Travel Scheme, it involves microchipping the animal; vaccinating against rabies; a blood test to demonstrate that the vaccine has worked; tick and tapeworm treatment before re-entry to the UK.

Not having to apply for a separate export licence to the country you're going to is a big step forward, but you should always check well in advance of going what the entry requirements are for your destination.

Blowfly Strike ... again!

I make no apologies for continuing to come back to this subject. In May we warned about the risk of Blowfly Strike in rabbits at this time of year. Well, we've had two cases of this already in the last month. One of them was probably the worst case I've ever seen. Sadly, she died; the other survived. This is a very distressing condition. I'm often asked what the worst thing is in veterinary practice, and I would say picking maggots off dying rabbits has to rank up there in the top three. Especially as this condition is so easily prevented. If you have a rabbit, prevention of blowfly strike should be your top priority at this time of year. Please, please, please if you haven't already done so, read the Blowfly Strike article and follow the simple instructions there. No excuses.

Out of Hours Cover

Like all vets are supposed to do, at Vetrica we offer 24 hour cover in the event of an emergency. This means that even outwith normal surgery hours, we will always see you if it's an emergency. As most registered clients should know, at Vetrica, we don't use an answer machine. When you call the regular surgery number out of hours, it is automatically diverted, at no extra cost to you, to the vet on call.

The diverting process does take a little time though. I've noticed that I occasionally get calls where the phone rings once, then stops. Even if I pick it up straight away, there's no-one there. Sometimes it happens many times in a row. Very frustrating. When I looked into this, I got a bit of a surprise. After finishing dialling the number, it takes 15 seconds before my phone starts to ring. That's 15 seconds of total silence. It's as if the phone has gone dead. If you hang up during this 15 second wait, my phone still rings. So if you ring us out of hours, please bear this in mind. Just hold on until the connection is made. Hopefully it will be worth the wait!

This Month's Interesting Case

Buddy is a two year old domestic cat. His owner brought him in one morning saying he was limping on a back leg. An examination of Buddy quickly revealed that he had broken his tibia (shin-bone), so we immediately admitted him for x-rays.

This x-ray picture of Buddy's leg clearly shows multiple fracture lines.

As you can see from the x-ray picture, Buddy's leg was fractured in more than one place, and presents many challenges to a successful repair. The biggest problem is the size of the intact fragment at the end of the bone. Any fixation technique would rely heavily on this fragment for stability. A small fragment like this will not provide very much support. Fortunately there was a large intact piece of bone at the top, so no worries there.

After discussion with Buddy's owner, he was operated on the following day. We repaired the bone using a single stainless steel pin placed in the medullary cavity (where the bone-marrow is normally found), with numerous wires wrapped around the many fragments. Between them, the pin and wires gave excellent stability, and the follow-up x-ray showed that we had good alignment of the bone fragments.

After surgery, you can see that the fracture was repaired with one pin and four wires. This resulted in quite good alignment of the fracture fragments. Note also the fibula which appears as a long straight piece of bone. When this is fractured, surgical repair is not normally necessary.

Having achieved such a good alignment of the fracture fragments, we were still a little worried regarding long-term stability. Over time wires and pins tend to slacken off. Add to this the fact that the end fragment was so small, we decided that Buddy would have to be kept confined for a prolonged period. We enforce rest in animals by confining them to a kennel. This is the animal equivalent to "bed rest". Cats generally tolerate this remarkably well, especially if they are kept in a good location where they can see what's going on.

It's now six weeks since Buddy's operation, and we saw him back just last week. He's using the leg well, and there are no apparent problems. Repeat x-ray showed the leg to be healing well, but not yet complete. We've allowed Buddy out of his kennel now, but he will need to be confined to the house for some weeks yet. Buddy should now make a full recovery.