Rolfe
8th June 2004, 03:49 PM
On Thursday a distraught pet owner turned up at the lab, cradling the dead body of his three-month-old labrador puppy. The puppy's head was showing out of the top of the bag, and the owner came to the front door, not the back where post-mortems usually arrive, and everyone who saw the case being booked in was very upset.
The post-mortem was being paid for by a vaccine manufacturer, because the puppy had had the second injection of his primary vaccination course only two days before his sudden death, and the finger was being pointed.
My colleague did the post-mortem. The puppy had a congenital malformation of the omentum, with a couple of gaps in what should be a complete fan of tissue carrying the blood and other vessels to the gut. A loop of intestine had happened to twist through one of the defects, and become trapped. The puppy had died of a twisted gut.
It was a tragedy for sure, because if only the defect had been known about in advance it would have been easy to correct - even if the puppy's illness had been discovered earlier, surgery might have saved him. But there was no way to know, and circumstances were such that the illness wasn't discovered until too late. But it didn't have anything to do with the vaccine.
Now, if the post-mortem had never been done, and instead the original assumption had been allowed to stand, it would have been one more brick in the wall of lies being built to discredit vaccination. I suppose it was worth the vaccine company paying for the post-mortem for that alone.
Today an eldery dog was brought in for post-mortem, by more conventional means. He had become ill and died within 48 hours of being treated by a widely-used anti-flea preparation. Again the drug company was paying for the post-mortem.
This dog had widespread cancer, of a type we won't know until we get the histopathology report back. Might have been a malignant melanoma, but I've never seen anything quite like it before. It's a bit surprising that nothing showed up either clinically or on a general blood profile done at the time the flea treatment was prescribed, but having said that, I've seen that happen before.
This happens all the time. I recall an incident involving two very sick dogs, one of which died, soon after being given another flea treatment, which was new on the market at the time. Although the owner was hell-bent on getting compensation from the drug company, to the point where she accused us of a cover-up, it transpired that the dogs had been let loose on the common after being treated, and they had found some illegal slug bait that had been dumped behind a bush.
Just a few examples to illustrate where first assumptions might not necessarily be confirmed when proper investigations are done.
Rolfe.
The post-mortem was being paid for by a vaccine manufacturer, because the puppy had had the second injection of his primary vaccination course only two days before his sudden death, and the finger was being pointed.
My colleague did the post-mortem. The puppy had a congenital malformation of the omentum, with a couple of gaps in what should be a complete fan of tissue carrying the blood and other vessels to the gut. A loop of intestine had happened to twist through one of the defects, and become trapped. The puppy had died of a twisted gut.
It was a tragedy for sure, because if only the defect had been known about in advance it would have been easy to correct - even if the puppy's illness had been discovered earlier, surgery might have saved him. But there was no way to know, and circumstances were such that the illness wasn't discovered until too late. But it didn't have anything to do with the vaccine.
Now, if the post-mortem had never been done, and instead the original assumption had been allowed to stand, it would have been one more brick in the wall of lies being built to discredit vaccination. I suppose it was worth the vaccine company paying for the post-mortem for that alone.
Today an eldery dog was brought in for post-mortem, by more conventional means. He had become ill and died within 48 hours of being treated by a widely-used anti-flea preparation. Again the drug company was paying for the post-mortem.
This dog had widespread cancer, of a type we won't know until we get the histopathology report back. Might have been a malignant melanoma, but I've never seen anything quite like it before. It's a bit surprising that nothing showed up either clinically or on a general blood profile done at the time the flea treatment was prescribed, but having said that, I've seen that happen before.
This happens all the time. I recall an incident involving two very sick dogs, one of which died, soon after being given another flea treatment, which was new on the market at the time. Although the owner was hell-bent on getting compensation from the drug company, to the point where she accused us of a cover-up, it transpired that the dogs had been let loose on the common after being treated, and they had found some illegal slug bait that had been dumped behind a bush.
Just a few examples to illustrate where first assumptions might not necessarily be confirmed when proper investigations are done.
Rolfe.