Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I have a collection of about 40 snakes and 20 lizards. Last week two of my snakes from the same species died within a period of two days. I took a saliva sample from a different snake because it was very close to their cage and these are the results: Enterococcus faecalis and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. What I want to know is your opinion about the situation, should I start injecting all of the animals or only the ones that are showing any signs of sickness or obnormal behavior?
p.s. I didn't take samples from the dead snakes because I didn't have the proper tools to take a sample.
Thank you for your help. Yonatan

but those can be passed to humans, so I would be very careful and ask about human contamination from a doctor as well. One is a gram positive and one a gram negative and they are both very resistant to antibiotics. Wear gloves and get those cages and animals cleaned up quick.
-----

both of those bacteria exist in what are apparently reptile-specific strains. It's unikely that they will be passed on to anyone caring for infected animals.

No doubt, bacteria are insidious little fast-evolving beasts and who knows what's possible? But both of those species are opportunistic and can be found in many healthy reptiles. I don't know of anyone who has ever come down with any sort of infection from those two bacteria species that was definitely transmitted from a reptile.

I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that Pseudomonas is normal oral flora (at least in people). Just because bacteria are found in a snake's mouth, it doesn't mean that the snake has an infection.

Jake

Saliva contains many bacteria for breaking down food to start digestion. You should do a stool culture and run an ova and parasite exam. Both tests have to be run from fresh stools. And if you can collect some urine (not the urates), culture that too. I recently had a Mountain Horned Dragon that I ran a stool culture on and had what looked to be some ssp of Pseudomonas. However I was unable to get a positive identification done at my work (I work in a hospital lab). The Dragon died a month later. So yeah, you can't really tell anything from saliva. You can culture anything but saliva. Good luck,
Josh

>>I have a collection of about 40 snakes and 20 lizards. Last week two of my snakes from the same species died within a period of two days. I took a saliva sample from a different snake because it was very close to their cage and these are the results: Enterococcus faecalis and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. What I want to know is your opinion about the situation, should I start injecting all of the animals or only the ones that are showing any signs of sickness or obnormal behavior?
>>p.s. I didn't take samples from the dead snakes because I didn't have the proper tools to take a sample.
>>Thank you for your help. Yonatan