#diagnostic testing

Look who I found in a dog fecal the other day: Giardiaspp!

We did the fecal because the dog had acute onset of profuse, foul-smelling, liquid diarrhea. In addition to the giardia, there’s also some motile rod-shaped and spirochete bacteria swimming around. These may or may not be contributing to the GI signs; some bacteria are normal inhabitants of the gut, others are pathogenic, and some can be both depending on strain or circumstances.

We treated with metronidazole and fenbendazole to kill the giardia, bland diet and maropitant to help with the diarrhea and GI discomfort, and probiotics to help reestablish the good GI flora that will also get killed by the antibiotic. The owner was also instructed in good hygiene and environmental disinfection practices to prevent re-infection and zoonotic transmission (the zoonotic risk is low given that different strains of Giardia typically infect dogs and people, but we don’t know if there are any immune compromised people in the household, so better safe than sorry).

The clinical signs quickly resolved, and the fecal was negative on follow-up.

((Sorry for the jumpy video; I had a hard time keeping these squiggly little dudes in focus and the phone lined up with the lenses at the same time ))

Our faithful old microscope finally kicked it (), and we’d been limping along with a cheapo one we got off Amazon, but we finally got enough saved up for a swanky new professional microscope!

The feel when you haven’t done a pig fecal in forever, so you aren’t sure if that’s ~really~ roundworm ova (since they’re so much smaller than the ones from dog and cat roundworm), but the vet trusts your judgement and deworms for rounds – and then your findings are confirmed. So very much confirmed.

And on top of that, now you have a new jar for your parasite collection!