Hi guys,
Thankyou to all who took part in my prevalence study into coccidia in beardies. I've submitted my project and my supervisor in uni reckons it will go for publication in a journal so watch this space if interested-this will take some time if it goes ahead.
The basic findings of my study were that prevalence in captive beardies in the UK is 58% (I believe this to actually be artificially low as I didn't use a stain to view the coccidia and more positives may have turned up if I had). There were no correlations between infection and age, weight or number of beardies in a viv - this throws up a number of interesting thoughts about constant reinfection and poor long term immunity.
Although I did do counts with the study they weren't included in my analysis as many loads were uncountable. The interesting thing about this is that some people with relatively low counts submitted samples saying their beardie had signs of poor weight gain, diarrhoea etc and others submitted samples with uncountable counts they were so high with their beardie showing no clinical signs whatsoever. Counts ranged from several hundred coccidial oocysts per gram up to hundreds of thousands o.p.g so there are several orders of magnitude difference from the lightest faecal loads to the heaviest.
The main message is that counts aren't the be all and end all in beardie coccidial treatments. Lots of apparently healthy beardies had very high infection rates. There hasn't been a study into what numbers of coccidia are significant disease-wise in beardies yet so make sure your vet is treating clinical signs not numbers.
Thanks again to all those that took part.
Andrew Monchar BSc (Hons) Final Year BVetMed student
Thankyou to all who took part in my prevalence study into coccidia in beardies. I've submitted my project and my supervisor in uni reckons it will go for publication in a journal so watch this space if interested-this will take some time if it goes ahead.
The basic findings of my study were that prevalence in captive beardies in the UK is 58% (I believe this to actually be artificially low as I didn't use a stain to view the coccidia and more positives may have turned up if I had). There were no correlations between infection and age, weight or number of beardies in a viv - this throws up a number of interesting thoughts about constant reinfection and poor long term immunity.
Although I did do counts with the study they weren't included in my analysis as many loads were uncountable. The interesting thing about this is that some people with relatively low counts submitted samples saying their beardie had signs of poor weight gain, diarrhoea etc and others submitted samples with uncountable counts they were so high with their beardie showing no clinical signs whatsoever. Counts ranged from several hundred coccidial oocysts per gram up to hundreds of thousands o.p.g so there are several orders of magnitude difference from the lightest faecal loads to the heaviest.
The main message is that counts aren't the be all and end all in beardie coccidial treatments. Lots of apparently healthy beardies had very high infection rates. There hasn't been a study into what numbers of coccidia are significant disease-wise in beardies yet so make sure your vet is treating clinical signs not numbers.
Thanks again to all those that took part.
Andrew Monchar BSc (Hons) Final Year BVetMed student
