Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Sigh

Nothing brightens your morning quite like getting up 10 minutes early to read about fecal flotation techniques.... how many more days till winter break??

4 comments:

  1. Geez, how hard can it be? Drop some poop in some water! Even Lawboy knows this!

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  2. Is coccidia or giardia really hard to find in a fecal as i've heard?

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  3. Ashley: Coccidia is not too tough to find provided you are using a good technique on your fecal float. Giardia is pretty tricky to find on a flotation, but sometimes you can see the trophozoites (the creepy little swimming stage of Giardia) on a wet mount -- where you just smear a little poop on a microscope slide, add a drop of saline, and put on a cover slip. For diagnosing Giardia, they usually recommend doing both a fecal float to look for Giardia cysts, fecal wet mount to look for trophozoites, AND a snap test to pick up fecal Giardia antigen. And if you don't find Giardia on any of those, that doesn't mean they don't have it -- since it's hard to find. At that point, if Giardia fits the clinical picture and the dog's symptoms, you load 'em up with metronidazole or another antiprotozoal drug, and look for a response to treatment as a tentative diagnosis. More info than you wanted? :)

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  4. Sounds good to me :) All I know is I'm not a fan of diarrhea :)

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