Yellow Fungus

[elevatethis]

Just wanted to post this up for informative reasons, my bearded dragon has come down with a case if yellow fungus in and around his vent area.

There's not a whole lot known about this condition, but when you see it on the outside around the vent, its usually a result of reasons internally. He's quite old...he's a rescue I've had for over 2 years, and at that time, his previous owner said she'd had him for 5-6 years, so unfortunately there's a chance that this is a result of his immune system just starting to wind down with age.

Its tricky to treat. Oral antibiotics tend to wipe out a lot of gut flora that keeps things like coccidea in check, so the use of those could just lead to other complications. Per www.beautifuldragons.com, topical treatments are the first thing you want to try before going to internal treatments.

I stripped out his cage completely, disinfected everything, and replaced his substrate with newspaper thats changed daily. Once a day, I'm giving him Nolvasan baths and I'm going to begin topical lamisil treatments tomorrow.

Wish him luck, I hope he can pull through. I'll keep yall updated on his progess.

[CTReptileRescue]

Good Luck Brad,
Let me know how he does.
Yellow Fungus is NOT somthing to mess around with...
Rusty

[elevatethis]

Just an update:

The yellow fungus is essentially gone. The entire enclosure was stripped down and sanitized, and I used newspaper which was cleaned each time he defacated. Daily topical treatments with Lamisil spray (the cream seemed too difficult to work into the affected area) and a weekly soak in chlorhexidine solution worked very well. I knew going into it that it wasn't going to disappear overnight, but after about 2 weeks it stopped spreading and after he had a shed this week, the affected area looks completely normal. As I watched it get better over the past 6-7 weeks, it appears as if it started around one of his femoral pores- one of them looks slightly irritated and may need a topical antibiotic ointment.

I probably will not go back to any kind of loose substrate. I was using playsand before and after seeing how much crud I was removing on a weekly basis, I'll probably use paper or carpet or something similar that I can tell is clean. Similar to the way I keep my snakes, just seems much more sanitary. I'm not certain if the sand was a contributing factor to the infection, but it certainly wouldn't make it any easier to treat.

Anyways, just thought I'd post this up in case someone runs into a similar problem.

[jglass38]

Nice job Brad! Now if you could just get rid of that other "fungus" we discussed. I told you to stay away from the TH.

[Kilo]

Sounds to me like he is a survivor!!! I wish you the best of luck man!

For the record I was under the impression beardies only live from 3-5 years? But then again I read that on a Petco care sheet. Can anyone shed some light on this?

[elevatethis]

I've heard 3-5, also 7-8, and some breeder at a show last year said up to 10. Who knows. Mine is ~7 and still going strong...I think its all about how they are cared for, especially early in life (proper diet, UVB exposure, etc).