This damn disease
is very hard to understand for a European vet since it originates in Spain, and
what can I tell you about it; first of all it is not a death sentence, at least
I don’t know of a case that a dog has died due to disease. What I do know is that there were dogs that died because the
treatment of this disease was wrong, that some vets in Europe started to use Glucantime
in an incredibly high dosis on these dogs. They should be more honest and ask
if they don’t know what they are doing, anything better than to kill a dog by
treating him wrong.
Because it
sometimes happens that you have an
adopted dog that was tested negative and all of a sudden he appears positive,
the answer is easy, nothing is perfect , but a testresult less than 80 is
always negative, anywhere in the world except it seems for some vet in France,
greedy of money, the methods of determining whether or not the disease is there
are precise but never at 100%. Some
tests, like PCT are very expensive and give out wrong positives, others like
IFI (indirect fluoresence immune) may
give out wrong positives and wrong
negatives, the Elisa Method and the agglutination in turn give out more wrong
negatives, but in all cases we are talking about an effectiveness of about
95/98%. Anybody who knows something about science knows that in science 100%
does not exist.
We test about
1200/1600 animals a year and therefore it would mean that about 50 dogs have
come up with a wrong testresult, and that is only based on statistics, not
because we are doing it wrong. And not only that, it could be that the dog has
been contaminated recently, even after having done the test, and if you are the
adoptant of one of our dogs and you have any problema with any so called
tropical disease, please let us know and send the information to educa@scoobymedina.com and we will
forward it to one of our experts at the University of Madrid or Zaragoza, like
Pablo or Guadalupe Miro, they will be delighted to be of help to these animals.
The test that the University of Zaragoza does for us is a agglutination test
that will either tell you it is positive or negative, but if it is positive we
don’t know the percentage. We don’t really need to know it either because if it
is positive, we will not let this dog be adopted, except the dog has been
especially chosen by somebody because they are capable of dealing with it, nor
could we test the dog every two months because of the money it will cost and thinking
about the small amount we are getting nowadays for an adoption, with everything
included; castration, deparasiting, vaccination , bloodtests, microchip,
paperwork and passport for the transport, with all this you can imagine there
will not be much left, at least not for us.
Coming back to
Leishmania, we have had a case of a dog which was positive for 8 years after
being with his new lady boss, a case of a teckel that went to England with a
Real Lady who I will never forget, I will never forget her cleaning the tiles
of the refuge when we were building it.
I hope this has
helped you, any way I will try to talk to Pablo so he can write a more
scientific article. Kisses, hugs and
licks from all our animals! Fermin
