I've had my beloved Arabian Uro (Egyptian subspecies) for about six years now, and by all accounts he has been a strong, healthy, onery little punk of a lizard, until this recent problem. He's in the middle of his most recent shed (and it takes forever for him to shed, and he never seems to do it completely, either), and it seems the soon-to-shed skin around his neck and underside of his forelegs became infected with what appears to be salmonella. It turned yellow, appeared to be becoming crusty-like on the ready-to-shed places, and in a couple places (underside) tiny blood-red dots appeared inside little pockets of loose, old skin.

I suspect the cause is my fault, from my neglect in duely changing his substrate and/or maintaining his enclosure. I had him on the speciality sand for captive reptiles that is supposed to be bacteria-resistent, but this summer has been unusually humid (VERY humid), and I had not taken this into consideration concerning my uro's environs.

Anyhow, I did what everyone says not to do -- removed as much of the ready-to-shed skin as I could, using dabs of mineral oil. Aside from the patient being very uncoorperative, this was fairly easy, except for one 1/8" spot on the back of his neck, where the scales appear to have been destroyed and the skin is bare, but not infected (I suspect this is the initial locus of the problem). Otherwise the skin between the scales is a little sore and pinkish in some places. So I have him in a medical cage with clean shedded paper, and cleaned his sore areas with hydrogen peroxide and dadded them with antibiotic ointment. Not all the yellowed areas were ready to be shed, so I dadded those areas with ointment as well, and have been cleaning his skin with the above routine every 24 hours.

So that's where I am at this point. Aside from being discontent with his smaller and plainer environs and very pissed at me (we used to be friends!), he's eating and eliminating as usual. I don't wish to give him oral antibiotics because I think I was able to catch this before it did serious damage to his epidermus and I don't think upsetting his digestive flora would do him much good right now.

The scaleless area on the back of his neck is staying clean, but I'm concerned about the remaining yellowed not-shedded skin. It doesn't appear to be spreading any further (the skin around his hips and hind legs is clean and shedding as usual), so I'm hoping for the best. If anyone has any tips or additional info on how to treat skin issues on an uro, or if you've ever dealt with this kind of problem with uros (I've only seen it in water turtles, and that was many years ago) and have some useful suggestions, I'd apperciate it! Thanks, AC and Athanasius the Uro, aka "Rudeboy"