Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hey guys,
SO.....I have been battling mites for about 4 weeks now. I had three rats (recently lost one to myco, she had a TERRIBLE start as a feeder and she made it to two....frankly, I was pretty happy) and only one, Peapoepoe, started showing any signs of mite infestation. I have been dosing my two girls with Ivermectin once a week with a dose about the size of a piece of white rice in peanut butter....so far, the scratch wounds are healing and disappearing, but I am worried about a recurrence....any suggestions?

Also, I noticed that when it cooled down, my rats myco began to flare up (which I believe is what led to the demise of my little champagne rex girl, Clarissa). My girl Sprinkles is extremely snuffly, with a very "congested" sound. Both girls just came off of a three week Baytril regimen (after Clarissa passed) with very little improvement in their snuffles. I was having good results with Echinacea (a year without so much as a snuff) and BAM! All at once. Any idea how to help speed her recovery without dosing her up with different antibiotics? She is still active and eating.

I have them in a heated room with their cage on a heating pad on carefresh, open wire cage, on Oxbow rat food, senior dog food, various fruits and veggies and fruit and veggie babyfoods, dried chicken. I am trying so hard to do my best here, with no luck at all. By the way, they were both Petco purchases (never doing that again, poor buggers).

Mites always come and go. I preferred to use a topical (bath) periodically to knock them right down -- an annual bath seemed quite sufficient. Once they started scratching and scabbing the full recovery would always take a while (a month or two) as they become quite compulsive scratchers and keep irritating the area.

Hey,
Which topical shampoo do you use? I used Zodiac years ago on one of my males that had the big nasty tropical mites and it worked fine.
Rachel

So, just one of you rats is scratching?

I'd have a skin scraping done at the vet's to confirm mites before dosing with ivermectin. (Well, I wouldn't use horse wormer paste either, but that's for another post.) You want to make sure it really is a parasite before you treat for them. Lots of things can make rats itchy- staph infections, dry skin from having the heat going in the winter, allergies, etc. If it's only 1 itchy rat, that would tend to make me think it was something other than bugs.

If it's a staph infection, the scratching won't stop completely without a round of oral antibiotics. You can put Neosporin on the wounds to help them heal faster.

As for the myco, I always had the best luck with baytril and doxycycline used together. There is also a drug called interferon (rx only) that can help boost the immune system.

Have they always been on the same bedding, or has anything changed recently? Sometimes a reaction to a new bedding can cause itching and/or sneezing.

Their diet and environment sound great to me! Sometomes, no matter what we try, and even when we do everything "right" these poorly bred, pet store rats are just sickly.
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~Rachel~

This is what I read in another forum on rat mites, this is from a very respectable vet tech.
"Slartibartfast: I've used Frontline spray very successfully on a batch of rats that had lice (three adults, two litters of fuzzies). I took them all out and lightly sprayed the bedding and tossed it around and let it dry, then (wearing gloves) I sprayed a squirt into a small dish and used one finger to paint a dab onto the back of the neck each baby rat (they didn't even have their eyes open yet), and lightly ran my dampened fingers over each adult rat. All the lice were gone by the next day, and none of the rats exhibited any problems. I love this stuff!"

I would recommend the frontline. zodiac is crap. Frontline for kittens is usually what's recommended.