I agree with you, Merryben. I believe I said that although you can give
antibiotics, lance etc., my opinion was to isolate and drain and keep
Icthanol on it. The antibiotics seemed to make the disease last
longer--- no help at all in the few cases that I allowed the vet to give
them.
Only if you give the wrong sort. Pigeon fever gets deep into the tissue and
is apparently in the lymphatics--not the sort of situation where a typical
blood-borne antibiotic can penetrate. And of course, there is no
circulation into an abcess, either. An appropriate "antibiotic" for deep
tissue infections such as this is one like IV sodium iodide--used to be an
old-time treatment for things like woody tongue in cattle. A vet in central
CA who dealt a lot with pigeon fever advised me, when we had a horrid
outbreak of it in central Oregon, to use sodium iodide in addition to a
regular antibiotic (SMZ was the antibiotic of choice, since abcesses will go
ahead and form and rupture when one is using it). We took his advice, and
in an outbreak where we treated 80 head in just a few weeks, we only had a
handful that didn't heal quickly and uneventfully. One massive IV dose of
sodium iodide, in addition to lancing and debriding, and accompanied by SMZ,
turned out to be by far the most effective treatment--WAY better than just
SMZ and lancing, and also way better than just lancing and cleaning. We
also found that the horses in our selenium-deficient area that were on
adequate selenium levels did not get hit near as hard as those that
weren't--so we also gave selenium to our cases.
BTW, pigeon fever very often CAN leave ugly scars. The only horse I ever
had who got it (amazingly, none of mine got it in the big outbreak, but one
filly got it when Kevin Costner and his crew were filming The Postman right
across the road from us--at least we dodged the strangles, influenza, and
all the other infectious diseases that the movie horses dragged into our
neighborhood) carries a scar on her chest from her abcess to this day.
Heidi
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