Left side picture is the day we found the problem and right side is halfway through her treatment. Fantastic improvement!
Stomatitis can be caused by so many different things. In this case we have a very well cared for individual in a closed collection that was found one day to have bloody saliva and foul smelling breath.
Excellent husbandry and a closed collection makes many of the scary infectious diseases unlikely. Cytology revealed inflammatory cells in otherwise normal oral mucosa. Bacterial culture revealed two different types of bacteria that are quite commonly found as normal flora. The difficult part is that each organism has some resistance to the usual medications.
Antibiotic resistance is getting more and more common these days and is a topic we covered in a series of posts last year.
Daily administration of silvadene cream on the irritated tissues in her throat and antibiotic intramuscular injections every 3 days has achieved rapid improvement. She is doing so well! Hip hip hooray!
We are thankful for her owners being so astute and caring. They caught the problem early and did not wait to seek out treatment like so many people often do. They are also doing an excellent job administering her treatments at home! She will need to continue these treatments for at least two weeks to prevent the resistant infection from coming back but it looks like she is going to be ok.
We may not ever find out what caused this but our best guess is she accidentally got some pieces of wood in her throat during a meal. This is one example of why we prefer to use paper for substrate at Snake Haus. With as large of a collection as we have maintaining other types of substrate is too much work. Perhaps this silly, accident prone girl should use paper for her substrate in the future too.
