Please Help! Results of Necropsy: Lungworms?!

[Herpvet]

Hi,

Sorry to chime in a little late, but a couple of comments in addition to those already made:

a) Certain lungworms burrow directly through the skin, and therefore CAN cause skin lesions - depends on the species of lungworm

b) Worm infestations won't show up on cultures (unless you're specifically culturing for the worms - might be theoretically possible, but certainly not routine as far as I'm aware) - you need to examine the faeces with a microscope

c) In my experience panacur is pretty ineffective against lungworms

d) I would advise going to the vet for wormer. If treating with a wormer in a potentially heavily infested amphib, it is usually worth giving concurrent antibiotic cover and anti-inflammatory drugs. If there's a lot of lungowrms, for example, them all spasming and dying from the wormer inside the lungs can cause a lot of damage, and predispose to bacterial or fungal pneumionia.

Hope this helps,

Bruce.

Hello guys.

So, I've gotten the results of the necropsy for Igby :sad: She died due to nodular pneumonia caused by lungworms. I'm a little surprised given that we did fecal cultures on both Igby and Kibbits! Wouldn't the worms have passed through and shown up in the culture? We definitely treated both Igby and Kibbits for all parasites that tested positive. Do you think it was just too late!?

Obviously, I'm very scared at this point from what I'm reading. Any advice on the following questions would be appreciated:

1. We kept little Quibble completely quarantined in a separate tank, on paper towels, and washed the tank each night with boiling water. We changed our gloves every time we handled each frog (so no cross-contamination there). We even had separate crickets for Quibble vs. Igby. Given how quickly these lungworms breed, do you think that he is okay?

2. Could Igby/Kibbits have only gotten this while living at the petstore, prior to us bringing them home OR can a captive environment be contaminated with parasites through other means, i.e. a new bag of substrate, crickets bought from the store, tap water?! We just want to make sure we are doing everything we can to protect our new frogs (other than NOT buying from the petstore and getting them from reputable breeders where we know they were captive bred!)

3. Before moving our new frogs (Ori and Boris) into their own quarantine tank (the main tank that Igby/Kibbits lived in prior to getting sick), we soaked everything in a 10% bleach solution and then rinsed multiple times with boiling water, baked the wood, etc. Would all that cleaning be enough to kill lungworms that might have been living in a tank, or could Ori/Boris now be exposed?


Any advice would be extremely helpful!! Has anyone dealt with this before? Why would lungworms cause spots on the skin? Why wouldn't this show up in cultures!?

We just don't want to lose anymore frogs : (