African grey with nares problem

Re: African grey with nares problem

Marie Kubiak — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 21:09:26 GMT

Hi,

yes I worry faecal PCR has too low sensitivity to pick up many of the positive animals. I use it for screening flocks but use serology for individual testing - this has a higher risk of false positives but I would argue that any bird that is seropositive is likely chronically infected as they don't tend to clear disease. Plus I'd rather overtreat than undertreat due to the bird and human consequences of infection!

The lateral radiograph has a marked thickening of the air sac line present cranioventral to the cranial renal segment - I would look at scoping this bird's air sacs to look at this abnormality in more detail and get samples for culture.

Marie

Re: African grey with nares problem

Violaine Colon — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 16:01:29 GMT

Hi,

In consult, no major signs, look very bright. The owner is concerned that the air is not flowing properly from the left nare and sometimes has wheezing noise. She also has period of lethargy and get better with antibiotic, but never get rid of it completely.

The owner is increasing the humidity in the room, she is offered fresh vegetables and fruits, so quite a good diet.

For Chalmydophila, do you always do serology, is it more reliable ? At the moment, we do on faeces as it is non invasive, I only had 1 positive and I think that it is underdiagnosed.

I attached the x-ray, thoses are from january.

Thanks for your help

Re: African grey with nares problem

Marie Kubiak — Thu, 30 May 2013 09:37:26 GMT

What exactly are the symptoms that you observe in consult and the owner reports at home? Any change in vocalisation or respiration? Any sinus distenstion or nasal discharge?

As Mark says, diet is often a significant factor in opportunistic respiratory infections. A seed based diet is deficient in vitamin A (among many other things) and chronic deficiency leads to squamous metaplasia of epithelial surfaces so the respiratory tract loses its protective specialised cells and is vulnerable to infection. Diet improvement would be crucial in getting grumbling issues sorted. Plus look for any environmental causes of respiratory irritation (smoke, aerosols, plug in air fresheners etc). Also consider doing serology for Chlamydophila before being confident it is truly negative as PCR on faeces can give false negative due to the intermittent shedding of the bacterium. If any alteration in respiration or vocalisation I would also carry out tracheoscopy to assess whether there is fungal growth on the syrinx and you can also look at the trachea in great detail at the same time.

Happy to look at radiographs if you are able to post them

Marie

Re: African grey with nares problem

Mark Hedberg — Wed, 29 May 2013 21:00:18 GMT

While Mark Rowland will probably steer you more precisely, I saw this a lot in Saudi; as far as I could discern it was a chronic upper respiratory infection/irritation - you'd get narrowing quite often. Root cause was substandard husbandry; owner needs to feed a much more varied diet, far fewer sunflower seeds, and much higher ambient temperature. (Most birds were kept indoors with very cold air conditioning.)