Just wanted to write a little update...

Last week, Louie's owner went back to the vets again (he has been a few times since this thread was originally posted) and took in a poo sample. I had passed on all the information, but he seemed adamant that it was something he was eating. Well, he got the results today and it is giardia!

He is getting tablets and some kind of paste to sort it out. His owner is glad to have an answer but he is worried that the problem won't be solved, I don't think he wants to get his hopes up. There were two samples, so he still needs to wait for the second one to come back.

I was wondering, do you think it is possible that the first load of diarrhoea (when he was on pedigree) could have been caused by the food? And that is why he is ok on JWB, and that this second bout is completely unrelated and is the giardia?

There are two rotties who walk in the park, and the owner never picks up after them. Louie's owner noticed a while back that they were always very loose when toileting, and he now remembers that roughly a week or two before the diarrhoea started again, Louie ate one of their poos

His owner obviously tried to stop him, but he had eaten most of it by then, so he is now wondering if they have it, and that is how Louie has got it...

There is a vaccination for giardia available in the U.S., but it is meant as a back up for something like panacur. Have your friend ask your vet. giardia cysts can live in a damp environment for months outside of a host. If Louie drinks puddles, this is probably how he got it.

Well, I'm not surprised after what I've recently been through with Zena as I did suggest it could well be this, but so glad he's finally got a diagnosis like me.

No, personally, I don't think it is the food, because in my experience of this parasite, this is how it manifests itself, it's all so intermittent, so you keep changing the food, things improve, so you believe it's the food, but then back it comes. He's very, very lucky to have got a diagnosis from his sample as it's so very difficult to get this unless you take a sample in every day for at least 3 days.

I would strongly suggest to him, that he repeats the Panacur in 2 weeks' time, and if he's only been prescribed Metronidazole, then that won't work at all, it just keeps it at bay, settles it all down, then it will surface again, unless he uses a 3 or 5 day course of Panacur along with the metronidazole.

For one whole week after finishing her medication, my dog was still producing big, piles of slop so please relay to him that this is all part of the process, and his dog will eventually get better. You are then approaching that 2 week period between worming, and your dog has bounced back to full health, producing normal stools, so you're reluctant to do another course of the wormer, but if it IS giardia and has been diagnosed, then you really must do this to save your dog from further problems later on, because it will return with avengeance.

I stayed on the bland diet because of the yuk that was still coming out of my dog, but after 6 days the vet and I decided to take the plunge and revert to chicken breast with kibble, and it worked, for 2 whole days now, we've had the most normal, solid poops again, and my dog is now 100% back to normal. I will still do the worming again next Monday just to make absolutely certain that this is not going to rear its ugly head again in 2 month's time like it always has for the past year here. It's a terrible thing to get rid of, I do know that, having spoken to other people who's dogs have contracted it.

Good luck, so glad he didn't get to the stage that Zena did with her vomiting that pink, frothy slime in the middle of the night.

I missed this thread and was surprised that no tests had been done.

Giardia can be extremely difficult to eradicate and often requires prolonged treatment.

Giardia affects humans too and is endemic in some populations, and it can be in the water etc.

I would concentrate on tackling the giardia and getting retests done until they are clear.

In the interim I would suggest that she feeds her dog a daily probiotic such as Healthspan Superprobiotic which contains 20 million bacteria of 5 types.

The capsules do not need refrigeration and are entericallly coated to survive the stomach.

It is vital that the gut is repopulated by good bacteria to help prevent the cycle of diarrhoea.

I would also be giving this dog a daily dose of Slippery Elm Food/Tree Bark Powder (available from Hilton Herbs/Dorwest).

A daily snack of:

one small pot of live yoghurt (such as Yeo Valley)
one banana (prebiotics)
Tree Bark Powder
Manuka Honey

All whizzed up in a blender as a smoothie, should be very beneficial for this condition (as long as the dog is not casein or lactose intolerant).

Slipper Elm soothes an inflamed gut and Manuka Honey heals.

HTH

I asked my vet about the banana, but he was against it, something to do with the potassium in it, but then he's only a vet who knows nothing about nutrition, but I'm sure he knows about potassium being detrimental in certain conditions perhaps.

Potassium is essential to life, and maintaining a healthy balance of electrolytes in the body, both my vets (allopathic and homeopathic) are very pro bananas, go figure!

Because potassium is required to regulate water balance this is why it is included in the electrolytes commonly given by vets to dogs with chronic diarrhoea such as Lectade!

Of course ANYTHING in excess can be toxic, but a banana a day would never be toxic to even a small dog.

It one of the reasons bananas are often recommended as kong fillers etc.

HTH

ETA many dogs in robust health benefit from a banana a day (especially when on a raw diet) as it is a great source of FOS (prebiotic) which has a synergistic effect with probioticss for great gut health.

Certainly both my dogs (aged nearly 12 and 7) love their bananas and they are both very well.

His owner did suspect ages ago that his diarrhoea could be due to drinking from puddles, but most of the dogs do and Louie is the only one that has this problem. I guess though that it could depend when exactly he got it, and if his first bout of diarrhoea was due to giardia... He had diarrhoea when his owner got him, so it could be from before then.

I was just wondering if it was the food, because while he was on Pedigree, he improved when he went on the pasta and chicken diet. Then he improved when he went on to JWB, and he had nearly three months when he was much much better. So, I just wondered if the first load could have been from the food, and the second was due to the giardia.

Thanks I told him all of this this morning, and hopefully he will listen. He said that he has to give Louie 7 tablets a day, and squirt a wormed down his throat for 3 days.

He said that the vet told him to wait 5 days before gradually reintroducing the kibble over a 5 day period... He wants to wait a wee bit longer until he changes over, but he is going to do it how the vet told him too.

Oh, I don't think he would have coped with that... the diarrhoea was enough for him to be stressed really badly!

They didn't do tests to begin with because they put it down to his food, but since he started getting diarrhoea not matter what he ate, they decided it was time for a test to be done.

Thanks for that, I have passed all the information on this thread on to him.

Something that does concern me though, is what the vet told his owner... Before this thread, I didn't know anything about giardia, so I did some reading about it. Everything I have read, says it is a parasite and that it can be contracted through water and faeces. The vet, however, told him that every human, dog, cat etc have giardia in them and that is it a type of bacteria... she said that for some animals they will cause problems whereas they will live fine in others with no issue... she said they he might never be affected again, or that it could come back so far down the line...

TRUE! It lives naturally in the gut, sometimes it causes problems, sometimes it doesn't, but when SOME dogs drink from dirty muddy puddles or dirty water they can pick it up too. I think the wtg is to keep the gut ultra healthy, and I'm now sticking rigidly with those ProFlora Purina sachets plus my pro biotics every day. If a dog's had a full blown case in the past, it's likely to recur and that could be what has happened in my case with Zena. However, this last episode the vet is convinced is from swimming in that dew pond the other week, when she went under and kept coming up covered in black slime and mud! He said it's not so much the water, it was that mud, whereas Fiona's 2 shepherds didn't do what Zena did, they had more sense!

All the best for this man with his dog. Sounds good the medication too. Remember about the re-worming in 2 weeks' time though he'll have to chat to his vet about that.

No ... it's almost certain to be the giardia - although of course if Louie got it from fields that were spread with human sewage sludge, then he could also have campylobacter, C-diff, stapphyloccus aureus, e-coli, cryptosporidium, the list goes on - could be 1 or more of these as well.

confused by the paste ... the ONLY treat ment for giardia is Panacur Oral Suspension ... the tablets could be Metronidazole, but the vet should also have prescribed Panacur.

This is just getting ridiculous - we are seeing giardia in the UK now in epidemic proportions ... I hate to be proved right because giardia is serious in that it is frequently not diagnosed by vets because 1) the test is very unreliable ... there are never false positives, but frequently false negatives and 2) giardia was virtually unheard of in the UK until this disgusting practice of spreading human sewage sludge on fields in place of artificial nitrogen fertilisers, and so therefore vets frequently won't consider giardia.

MAY I PLEASE MAKE A HEARTFELT PLEA TO EVERYONE WHOSE DOG HAS ANY OR ALL OF THE SYMPTOMS OF GIARDIA - chronic diarrhoea, or indeed chronic constipation, extremely malodorous faeces, frequently yellow in colour, very mucousy, slimey faeces, frantic eating of grass, vomiting of yellow bile, displaying clear signs of discomfort, general malaise, to consider the possibility of giardia before anything else. The treatment is cheap, and harmless ... go to your local Pets at Home, or Pet City, or good pet shop, and purchase yourself sufficient Oral Suspension Panacur for your size of dog. Dose the dog for a minimum of 5 days with the correct dosage x weight, and if the results are a dramatic improvement, you can rest assured that your dog has giardiasis. The fact that Panacur works is self-diagnostic, you do not need to go to the expense of visiting a vet, although of course this is always advisable.

change vets immediately!! He is talking an absolute load of tosh!! Giardia is a single-celled protozoan, similar to amoeba. It is NOT a bacterium, it is a parasite. And it is absolute rubbish to say that every single human, dog, cat has giardiasis ... he honestly should be struck off for displaying such ignorance!! And giardia ALWAYS comes back. Both myself, my husband and my dogs have suffered from multiple attacks of giardia, the dogs far more than us.

You have to treat it very robustly - we now dose both ourselves and our dogs with Oral Suspension Panacur for 7 days to make absolutely sure - we personally find that the 5 days recommended by Panacur themselves is insufficient, but then we do have very large dogs - I wouldn't recommend anything smaller than, say, a spaniel, treating with such a robust regieme without consulting a vet first.

But honestly, you really do need to consider another vet ... this level of ignorance is absolutely appalling!!