Treatment for Listeriosis and/or Goat Polio.

plain vision · #1 11/30/06, 10:24 PM

Dee,

Sorry to hear about your loss. I never read your post until today but wished i would have. The blindness combined with the scouring and feed situation really reads more like listeriosis. Telling Goat Polio from Listeriosis can be difficult so many producers just treat them for both. Yours reads more like the listeriosis then the polio. There is a local vet (he has his own herd of boers)... we were discussing goats recovering from listeriosis and he said out of the 5 that he has had develop that, none have recovered. I am telling you this to make you feel some better about what happened to you this week.

OSU told us the treatment for it last year. We had a buck that had something very similiar to Listeriosis. We kept him alive with injections off and on for a couple of months, actually and probably i can attribute his longevity at this point to more prayer. We decided we could keep him alive for a long time off of dexamethasone/penicillin/thiamin injections twice daily. We finally put him down as we realized the quality of life wasn't in keeping him alive by injections.

We gave about 8cc of penicillin twice a day (i used the longacting, aqueous solution) subQ.

We started out with 7 cc's of dexamethazone IM twice a day (back off on dex about 1/2 cc a day). So we didn't have to give so many injections we would pull the thiamin up in the same needle as the dex. We initially pulled up 5 cc of thiamine (i would never use the B complex unless desperate). You might would even do better getting b1 pills at the store and bolusing them with them or crushing them up and putting them in liquid and drenching them if you are not able to get it from a vet in the liquid form. It might would take 10 pills though if they are only 100mg pills which sometimes they are. 500 mg per 100 lbs. bodyweight.

summary:

Penicillin 6-8 cc's twice a day, every day until a day after the last symptoms disappear.

Dexamethazone 7 cc's twice the first day backing that off 1/2 a cc every day (we did that for about 5 days, the amount of days depends on symptoms). That ended up being 14 cc's the first day then. We gave that in the muscle. If you use Dex on a pregnant doe, she is very likely to lose her kids. So be careful with this product.

Thiamin (b1) 10 cc's (5cc's twice a day) the first day given with the dex. We gradually took it back to where we were giving about 5 cc's a day total. It is safe, so we tend to give more.

If they aren't eating and drinking, then you need to find ways to keep them hydrated. Some say they drink about a gallon a day. Some will even recommend stomach tubing them that amount daily if they aren't drinking. We have never needed to go to that extent to hydrate them yet. Hope we don't ever need to.

We continued in giving him shots off and on for somewhere around two months before we decided it was enough. As long as we gave them to him he was fine, when we backed off he eventually became paralyzed and then we put him down. We did all we could and with that said ... with some sicknesses they just seem to die sometimes no matter how hard you try.

I know that probably won't make you feel any better about your loss, but i really understand. I beat myself up after a loss also.

Once again sorry about your loss.

sonja

DocM · #2 12/01/06, 10:10 AM

Hijacking your thread:

For everyone reading this post: Remember, dosages of ALL medications are based on the weight of your individual animal, and the concentration of the medication you're delivering. Do not follow the directions someone posts for their goat. Thiamine comes in different dilutions, from 10mG/mL up to 1000mG/mL. This is true for pennicillin also. Serious side affects of over or under dosing can cause more problems than the original diagnosis. Reading "I gave my goat 4 cc's of xxx" doesn't help if we don't know the concentration or the weight of the goat involved.

Personally, I always try to give recommendations about medications in dosages per weight and/or concentration. I don't want someone to dose their 200 lb boer buck using the same dosage I used for my 80 lb lamancha doeling.

Every single goat owner should either have a great goat vet, a very experienced mentor available for health related questions, or at the very least, own a good goat health book. I recommend the following:

http://hoeggergoatsupply.com/xcart/p...t=0&bestseller

The Goatkeeper's Veterinary Book III by Peter Dunn

plain vision · #3 12/01/06, 11:10 AM

Thank you,

Most producers would feel pretty safe in giving those doses of thiamin and penicillin to even an 80 pound goat on up to a 250 pound animal. Because penicillin is safe enough that some producers will give shots of that as high as 20 cc's ... and some don't consider much the size of the goat. We haven't gone that high simply because it isn't necessary. We have given babies as high as 10 cc's a day (week old kids) and it saved them. That dose we use 5 cc's more as a drench to prevent bad bacteria in the gut from killing them. (keep epinephrine on hand when giving penicillin in case of shock)

Extra thiamin is simply excreted out of the goat's system if it isn't used.

On Dexamethasone, i would be cautious about that. Because it can cause bred does to slip their kids. We used it at very high levels on a yearling bred doe last year per OSU recommendations. She was dying of a respiratory situation (never diagnosed completely by them) and we went some past 14 cc's of that on her a day ... possibly as high as 16 cc's on a 100+lb goat, she weighed probably 150lbs less than our buck. She lived and didn't even slip her kid. When she delivered a healthy buck kid so many months later, we named him Miracle. Our dex solution is 2mg. per ml or cc. We have been safe in using it and many others. But i am not a vet. I am just giving recommendations on what has worked for us and been recommended. The doses on the bottle for that is even vague. If i come across our vets orders on that for us ... i will try to post more specifics.

Below is a link that has a chart on how much penicillin to use per lbs. of goat. That website has some excellent health articles on goats and Suzanne does a pretty great job on keeping up with fresh research and her personal findings. She has around a thousand goats in Texas, so is very experienced at what she does. I would caution individuals about joining the message board there unless you have tough skin, she isn't very personable but she truly loves goats.
http://www.tennesseemeatgoats.com/ar...steriosis.html

Hope that helps,

sonja
www.aopv.com