Alabama rot in north wales

[Raven oaktree]

A dog has died in my area from AR, 8 year old yorkie, died of skin lesions and kidney failure ..vet couldnt save him poor thing.

 

[6th Sense]

Sounds nasty, is it uncommon in the UK then? Sorry I've only heard of it in passing.

 

[Chatterdog]

Poor doggy. It's not widespread in UK yet but more new cases seems to be popping up all over. This is a good site http://www.forestry.gov.uk/alabamarot.

 

[Raven oaktree]

as far as i know its uncommon, but not good news to have in your area

 

[eingana]

It may be uncommon, but I already personally know one dog who has had it. Thankfully she survived and now just has bald patches where the rot happened. This was in the Peak District BTW.

I think it's fairly safe to assume that the causative agent is pretty much everywhere- the issue is that we don't know exactly why this causes problems in some dogs and not the thousands of others that must be in contact with it. In the case that I was around, the dog got the lesions, one of which was a dreadfully affected paw, and a high fever and came across as very 'unwell' and the whole thing took weeks to recover, but she was walking in the same area as the 3 other dogs that my friend has and the thousands of other dogs that regularly walk in the same area, yet other cases have not been reported.

 

[Raven oaktree]

Yea, when people say dont worry its uncommon...well that dosent really put my mind at ease because we dont know how its spread or why one dog becomes ill and others dont. So now its in my area i take extra precautions..i.e wash down legs , look for sores etc more often than normally do. It just makes me more vigilant really..ive seen a dog with it, but up by the new forest so felt sick when the wrexham case was confirmed, knowing its probably everywhere and having a confirmed case is 2 different things iMO... ...it makes it worse because we have no idea where the dog was walked ....so for now im just making sure i check their legs/feet and in between toe pads every morning x

 

[eingana]

Another problem is that the diagnosis is also a bit hit and miss. Since we don't know what causes it and there's no test to define the disease, some of these reported cases may or may not be the same disease.

I know what the lesions on my friend's dog looked like and yes, they looked very much like the lesions I've seen on photos of the 'Alabama Rot' cases but I'm a scientist and I know that just because they look the same we have no proof that they ARE the same.

Recently scientists have proven genetically that what had been thought for hundreds of years to be one species of South American spotted cat is actually two completely different and separate species which happened to have evolved on the same continent and although they look identical, they evolved from different species hundreds of thousands of years ago(which is also an indicator of how strong the basic model of 'spotted cat of a middling size and dimensions' can be).

Is there one Alabama Rot, or a few, or dozens? How can there be isolated cases as far apart as these cases are if the causative agent is rare? There's no mechanism of spread between cases which makes sense apart from a common agent which is already widely present in the environment but just hasn't met a susceptible dog yet (assuming that the individual afffected dogs aren't enormously widely travelled and been to the same dog shows as each other, of course).

Sorry, can you tell I studied epidemiology? I'll stop worrying people now, shall I?

 

[Raven oaktree]

What a fantastic explanation..im just going to say I agree with everything you said..ride on the back of your intellect .x