Let's Clear Some Stuff Up About IBD

[Redneck_Crow]

I'm just taking a guess here, but it may be that IBD is like another retrovirus, HIV, in that there is not just one "strain."

Common knowledge used to be that once you turned up HIV positive, your days were numbered and that the number wasn't a large one. Now that we're a few years into recognizing HIV, strains that do not appear to cause the disease have been discovered. link We're also finding out that some folks are genetically resistant to HIV. link

I think that a lot of the conflicting information we hear about IBD is not that some folks don't know what the heck they're talking about but that they are possibly seeing the effects of different strains of IBD and how they affect animals with different inherent genetic resistances or predispositions.

Since IBD hasn't had the research money spent on it that HIV has, we're not getting a good overall view of what the true nature of the beast is. We do know that it can kill. We see that it can kill quickly in some cases; we see that in some other cases it has apparantly lain dormant for many years before becoming symptomatic, and we see indications that in some others it might not be deadly at all.

My hunch is that many different people are getting a good picture of what IBD does and does not do in how a particularly strain they have encountered affects the particular animals they have dealt with. It's kind of like the way HIV was perceived when it was first recognized. We "knew" what it did, or we thought we did. Now we know that HIV can do many things, or in some cases, it doesn't do anything at all. At this point I don't discount anyone's experiences with IBD. I just try to remind myself that whatever their experience is that it's not likely to be universal. Mine, if I do have one, might be wildly different from the next guy's and that doesn't make either of us an idiot.

My $0.02 worth. I've only ever seen one strongly suspected case of IBD in person but I have seen many cases of AIDS as a nurse and I know that the clinical picture with that retrovirus differs wildly from case to case. Viruses "like" to mutate--it's one reason that they are so difficult to pin down. Smallpox can kill, it can be survived, and it can occur undetected. Tricky things, viruses. We can't even all agree if they're alive or not.