This Month at Vetrica

10 August 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.

Flea Season Again

It's flea season again, and as usual, we continue to see dogs and cats with that have been treated with ineffective pet shop and supermarket remedies. Flea collars, powders and cat spot-on preparations are the worst offenders in this respect. There is absolutely no reason why your cat or dog should have fleas. Fleas are easy to get rid of when you do things right, and at Vetrica, we guarantee it. The important things are to treat all the cats and dogs in the household with an effective product, at the correct intervals, all year round. There is a full discussion about fleas and flea control here.

Vaccinations

With the seemingly never ending debate about vaccinations for animals and humans in the media, it's easy to forget why we actually vaccinate our pets. When a new disease first appears (and there have been many in the last few years), there is a sort of mass hysteria, with a clamour to produce a vaccine. Those of us old enough to remember the emergence of parvovirus are able to recount stories of people queueing down the street to have their dogs vaccinated. Over the years we learn to live with the disease, and assume that its all gone away, because there are no longer daily stories about animals or people dying with the disease. It's not because the disease has gone away, it's just that it's not news any more.

In the past month this practice has seen several cases of parvovirus in young puppies. Although most died, by using interferon, we did manage to save some. There was a large outbreak of parvovirus earlier this year in Glasgow, and many dogs died. The widespread re-emergence of parvovirus is a frightening prospect. The good news is that we have an excellent, safe vaccine against parvovirus, which is fully effective from 10 weeks old, and lasts for 3 years.

Vaccination is inexpensive (less than a quarter the cost of a course of interferon), and gives us an opportunity to examine a pet for the early signs of disease that would otherwise go unnoticed. Unfortunately, not all the other diseases that we vaccinate against have such long lasting cover, so we do still need to continue vaccinating annually.

Quote of the Month

He doesn't bite...but he has been known to nip.

This Month's Interesting Case

Another broken leg this month. Some say disasters come in threes. Well, Candy was one of three patients presented to us in the same week at Vetrica last month with a broken leg. Adding to this mystery was that all three patients came in on consecutive evenings at about 10pm. Needless to say, I was quite relieved when 10pm came and went on the fourth night without incident!

Candy's fractured radius and ulna are easily seen on this picture.

Candy is a young Whippet X dog. Her owner said she cried after jumping out of a car, and on arrival at the surgery, the leg was obviously broken. We sedated and x-rayed her that evening, and as you can see from the picture on the right, both her radius and ulna were fractured. This is quite a common injury, and generally easy to deal with, especially in fully grown dogs. Many will do well with a plaster cast, but often we prefer to use a metal plate to join the fragments of bone together.

This break was not suitable for a plaster cast because the two ends of the radius were not in contact with each other. However, the main problem was that the break was so close to the end of the bone. This makes the application of a plate very difficult because there is not much room to place the bone screws that hold the plate in position; and there are a lot of important tendons in the way of the plate. Despite these difficulties we decided that there was just about enough room to get the plate on.

After surgery, you can see that the fractured radius was repaired with a plate and five screws. This resulted in very good alignment of the fracture fragments. Note also the fractured ulna which was not repaired.

Fortunately, the operation went without any major problems, and we managed to apply a reasonably sized plate without too much difficulty. (We always apply as big a plate as possible). X-rays taken after the operation showed a good alignment of the two sections of radius. You will see from this picture that we have not repaired the ulna. This is the norm for these types of fracture in all but the very largest dogs. Candy went home a couple of days later, and is currently well on the way to recovery. I'll let you know how she gets on.

And finally...we had to share this picture with you. In May we showed a picture of a dog with retained temporary (milk) teeth, highlighting how important it is that they are removed. Well, just look at this. This poor dog had fourteen temporary teeth to remove! The temporary teeth visible in this picture are highlighted with white arrow-heads. Fortunately the dog was none the worse for the experience.