Day 6 - Rare Indeed

Written by Erin

Today I received a very exciting phone call concerning Cooper's rare parasite, Baylisascaris procyonis. First, though, I will begin with his update.

I went to clean up a Cooper pooper pile around noon and I found a roundworm! Only about half an inch was sticking out and it was brown like the feces. If I hadn't been looking for it I never would've noticed it. I milked it out of the turd and it was approximately 4" long. Many of you may be squirming right now, unlike the worm, but I was squealing like a kid in a candy store. If you don't want to see the gruesome picture, I suggest you don't scroll to the very bottom of this page.

resting in the sun

Just as it was getting dark, Cooper planted his first pile of diarrhea outside in the grass. Unfortunately we can't just roll up the grass like a towel and throw it away. Since we have seen loose dogs wandering the neighborhood before, we decided to go ahead and flame it. Mason did the honors.

flaming poop

I am starting to see Cooper more as a puppy now rather than just a sick, nasty creature. He holds his head up when sitting now, unless we are within a foot of him (he knows we're about to pick him up). I found him sitting up in the crate several times today, and he continued to bark intermittently like the past 2 days. He explored a little bit outside but he is still nervous and slow moving. Now that some of his bloating has gone down, I can really appreciate how skinny he truly is. You can almost see his entire skeleton. I brushed up on my anatomy by naming the bones. I thought I saw a tick on the tip of his ear, but upon closer examination it was just a large crusty wound. As I squeezed the tip of the ear while holding it up some pus started to extrude from the area. He is still very flakey and very stinky, but if you compare a picture of him today to the one on Day 1 there is a significant improvement.

Now, about that phone call. It was from Dr. Michael Yabsley, a faculty member at UGA who focuses his research on wildlife diseases and specializes in parasitology. He was one of our professors for our parasitology class. Dr. Yablsey clued me in to how rare this case of Baylisascaris really is. Apparently this disease is quite common in the Northeast, but less so in the Southeast. Infected raccoons have only been found in 2 counties in Georgia - Dekalb and Athens-Clarke County. A canine case has never been reported in the Southeast! This is a truly exciting case that will be the focus of a lot of study.

First, we have to determine if the puppy actually had a patent infection or if he just digested eggs from raccoon poop without developing an infection. To do so, we need to determine if the eggs were larvated or not. An infected animal will shed un-embryonated eggs in their feces and it takes several days for the eggs to larvate and become infective. We will look at another fecal float from Tuesdays stool sample to evaluate the eggs. Even if they are larvated (indicating that the puppy is not actually infected), the case would still be noteworthy since Baylisascaris hasn't even been found in raccoons that far south in Georgia. I will also bring the worm from this morning in to the lab so we can look at it under a microscope and determine if it was Toxocara (dog roundworm) or Baylisascaris. This puppy is a prime candidate for a case report. His story has been reported to other scientists who specifically study this parasite, and he may be of use for their studies as well. Cooper certainly is getting a lot of people excited!

roundworm removed from feces