Posted by:
kirby
at Thu Feb 24 22:05:05 2005 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by kirby ]
I am hoping some Vets can answer this question for me. How much diagnostic pathology training do Vet students have before they can start diagnosing tissue specimens. Of this training how much of it is done specifically on exotics? I ask this out of my own ignorance redarding Vet training. I am a Pathologist and had to do 4 years of residency training in autopsy and surgical pathology before I began practicing. I have since performed hundreds of posts and thousands of surgicals and well know the value of tissue pathology.
I ask this question because Vets have not commented on the whole topic of posts although it is frequently raised on this forum. I am interested to know what Vets feel is the best condition to recieve an animal for a post and what to do between death and post. I want to know if the average Vet, even if they are trained in exotics , has the expertise to perform a post on a dead boa and give me a meaningfull result. Alternatively I want to know if there is specialty training in exotics surgical and autopsy pathology and where the centers are.
The reason I bring this up is that we deal with some very expensive animals with genetic mutations and I want to know if the autopsy reports we get adequately answer our questions. I have no doubt that a Vet can dissect a boa and get a generalized feel for systemic disease. If my animal is a baby new morph who dies with an enlarged heart and edematous lungs will my Vet be able to tell if it is a congenital anomaly, infection, aspiration or some other cause? Will the Vet have a knowledge base to compare the changes present with post data from other morphs to recognize trends or common pathways of disease?
All of this leads up to my fundamental question. Should we be sending our expensive animals to nationally recognized centers to have our posts done so that the most up to date pathology concepts are applied to these animals? Certainly it would be up to the owner to decide if they want to pay the cost but wouldn't it make sense to have a few regional centers where these posts are done. In this way data can be gathered on morphs such as albinos to see if they really are more prone to certain diseases. It certainly seems like the demand for usefull knowledge will be dramatically increasing as the Herp world continues to expand at a remarkable rate. I would be interested to know for example if there are characteristic patterns of lung pathology based on the type of cage, bedding or food animals are exposed to. Academic ceneters could use the money from the posts for research in areas like IBD.
Hopefully someone will be able to answer this for me and we can at least begin some standardization in how we as Herpers approach posts.
Bill Kirby
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 Autopsy of animals ...any Vets in the house? - kirby, Thu Feb 24 22:05:05 2005
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