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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

....I have a local vet who only practices with "exotics" which means reptiles but also birds, ferrets, and the like. Despite his many years working with snakes, it has been my experience that all of the most serious testing (like post mortems) are farmed out to other specialized labs. This is the same experience I have had with my own local doctors. I recently had biopsies performed on three moles on my back. The tissue samples were sent out to a specialized lab for the pathology to be performed. Fortunately, the pathologist found the cells to be of the normal variety. I think there are negatives and positives to this practice. On one hand, medicine is removed yet one more step from the patient. It becomes more impersonal and the results are filtered through more people (kind of like hearing a story after it was retold for the tenth time). On the other hand, my hope is that the doctor examining the tissue is very well trained and experienced at that particular task (but we never know). I think it would be advantageous to find a vet or lab that would have the expertise and interest to work with a large number of boa owners and help us learn about our animals on a broader level. The best scenario would be to find a person who is both a boa owner and a vetinarian. The biggest problem to our learning what we need to know is that the local vets are seeing the problem on such an isolated and small scale. They may see a deceased albino boa in 2005 and then not examine another one until 2009. We need someone who is going to examine boas on a regular basis and begin to accumulate the data necessary to draw some real conclusions.

It would be beneficial if we were more organized on a national level. Let's say we had a dues paying national association of boa & python hobbyists. We could sponser a scholarship whereby we could select a talented vetinary student who would be given the task of researching the major health issues affecting boids. Rather than our monies going toward "hazy" diagnoses from local vets with limited experience, we would paying for more definitive results and contributing to a centralized effort of data gathering.

Of course, an effort like this would be a bit more costly but the limited resources of medical research have always been guided by dollars. Third world diseases are almost completely ignored by drug companies.....unless the disease shows up here.

Bill what Vet do you use we haven't had the need for one yet but we are breeding Boas so I'm sure there will come a day when we will.

As far as this IBD conversation I think A lot of people are jumping the gun, As far as I know there is know definitive diagnoses yet and you know what they say about assuming something (You make an a$$ out of you and me) I'm sure there is some reason for concern but some times accusations are made without any real proof. Its kind of like Cancer we don't know were some of them come from or if you can catch them for others. Like Jeremy said the only thing we can do is control and eliminate it through good husbandry no body wants to be labeled with this disease so do your best to keep it out of the market that's all we can expect until the truth is found thanks for reading Scott

Go to www.arav.com and look for veterinary contacts there.

As an animal health technologist (or vet tech in the usa) my experience is that all posts should be sent out to specialist labs as you had suggested. It is the clients dollar decision however.