Quote Originally Posted by angllady2 View Post
While I find this thread extremely informative and I'm very glad it was posted, I cannot wrap my mind around someone experiencing a regurge and then immediately feeding the snake again and then again while it kept regurging. This to me is all kinds of wrong.

Notwithstanding I know that a regurge in snakes is serious, common sense should tell someone even with no knowledge it's a bad thing. Especially if the food had started to rot, and undoubtedly it was supremely nasty, common sense should tell you the snake needs time to recover from that.

At least you were able to find out the real reason it died, which counts for something.

Gale
Gale:

I can wrap my mind about it. We see people post about what to do here when it happens. Some people feel that a snake needs to eat every week - period. There appears to be some lack of fulfillment if that belly isn't full every week.

Frankly what I can't wrap my mind around is the fact that a vet would diagnose IBD despite a recent history of regurges obviously related to food size. When I got the call, it was not pleasant, it was literally "you sold me a snake with IBD and if you don't make it right I'm going to the BOI with you."

The fact that a vet would give that definitive diagnosis without a shred of proof, taking the history of the animal into account or even doing any testing is beyond me. FWIW, this vet is listed on the "List" of reptile vets that newcomers get referred to.

There are several things here that bear keeping in mind - first and foremost is find a good vet. Second, there are fatal consequences to not following proper recuperative protocols when dealing with a regurge. Lastly, vets appear to be seeing OPMV more than IBD, but are seeing asymptomatic IBD animals succumbing to OPMV - not IBD.

Remember all the early horror stories about people rapidly losing most of their collections to IBD? I do. While I discounted a few of them because there were never definitive proof of IBD (and these later played out in other places when it was discovered on one of the most famous "cases" that the killer was bacterial encephalitis) some of them were hard to ignore as inclusion bodies were ultimately found.

An inexperienced vet watches a snake rapidly die. The animal won't eat, comes down with a vicious RI that doesn't respond to treatment. In it's last two days it begins corkscrewing and flopping. The vet suspects IBD, the owner does a necropsy targeting the most commonly afflicted IBD tissues and boom - IBD is the culprit.

What my vet is saying that she is seeing cases where the above occurs, but the killer is OPMV and the animal is coincidentally an asymptomatic IBD carrier. A less experienced vet never considers OPMV and never looks for it.

It's something to think about.