Respiratory Infection

[BoiseBallz]

...I never got a blood culture done when I took her to the vet, which I guess is a no-no. The vet gave me the baytril based off his 35 years of experience with reptiles, and luckily he was right. It was just a bacterial infection, but RI's can be viral, in which case I believe Baytril won't help in curing the infection. It's better to get the culture done so the vet is definitely certain of what to prescribe...

This is not exactly correct. A blood culture will almost never be positive in a RI. What you are likely referring to is a choanal culture (of the respiratory secretions); however, the most common course of action/standard of care is a 10 day course of presumptive antibiotics directed at the most likely bacterial organisms, and if the animal doesn't show significant improvement/resolution, then you culture to better direct therapy. That isn't to say that this is the only correct or reasonable treatment, but your reptile vet with 35 years experience wasn't just lucky .

Some advocate culturing immediately, but culture and sensitivity results can take a week or more, depending on the organism. Would you want your ball python languishing without antibiotics for a week while waiting on culture results? Unlikely. So, you are, of course, going to want to start presumptive antibiotics, and a large majority of ball python RIs are caused by a few common bacteria that are going to be cured by the presumptive antibiotics anyway. Also, cultures can be confounded by oral contaminants. So, why culture, at added expense, when you are going to start antibiotics anyway and will nearly complete the course of antibiotics by the time culture results are available - especially when you will, in most cases, have already cured the infection?

Nebulization of f10sc is done at a 1:250 concentration for 10-15 min/day and is ideally used as an adjunctive therapy alongside antibiotics, and sometimes mucolytics, for known or presumed bacterial infection (or with antifungals in fungal infection) and can be done alone or with mucolytics for known or presumed viral infection.