So just how common and how contagious IS IBD?

[meowmeowkazoo]

There is a friend of mine who used to haunt Repticlic with me. Like me, he's completely out of boids and, unfortunately, he is also off the forums. Our loss - an old fart with a wicked sense of humor and a ton of knowledge about a wide variety of snakes.....but I digress.

I forget what year it was, but he had three boas that rapidly became ill - not eating, showing respiratory distress, etc, The first one died, was necropsied and it was determined it had IBD. The second and third also died within the next week or so and tests confirmed IBD.

A fourth and fifth boa became ill, then his one of his womas, and a savu and then some other liasis became sick. The fourth boa died, the woma and the liasis died. The fourth boa tested positive for IBD but neither the woma or the liasis tests positive - both die. The fifth boa dies and two more boas show symptoms.

The fifth boa is necropsied and does not have IBD. The sixth and seventh boa die. One test positive for IBD, the other doesn't.

By my memory, he had 7 boas die, 5 test positive for IBD, 2 do not. He loses a total of 5 pythons, only tests two for IBD. All pythons he tests come back negative.

At this point, his vet is baffled. Here was another "text book" case of IBD tearing through a boa collection, but how can it be IBD if 4 of the 9 snakes tested do not have IBD?

In the end, it was determined that he was actually dealing with OPMV.

So how do we explain the fact that 5 of the dead snakes also tested positive for IBD?

Easily, 5 of the 7 boas that died were asymptomatic carriers - a 70% asymptomatic carrier rate.

There have been purported cases of IBD wiping out collections. Let's take my old friend's example and apply it elsewhere. How many vets scream OPMV when a boid becomes rapidly ill? We know that IBD does not really kill so quickly - as a matter of fact most indications are that once symptomatic, an animal could conceivably hang on for an undetermined amount of time with palliative treatment.

But I do know one fairly common virus that kills quickly and spreads quickly. That's OPMV. With OPMV, once snakes start dying in a collection they do so fairly rapidly.

Oh - and they often suffer convulsive death throes that look a lot like what many people mistakenly think IBD looks like - convulsing, twisting, curling, etc.

That is really fascinating information, but how was it determined that he was really dealing with OPMV? The way you described IBD makes it sound like some kind of autoimmune disease, so is it possible that the IBD made the snakes more susceptible to OPMV? I read that OPMV is much more common in venomous snakes, but I'm not sure how common it is in boids compared to IBD.