***Posted by the BLBC automatic Reptile News Feed***

Diagnosing stomach disease in pet reptiles

A popular ?get well? card shows a raccoon saying to a snake, ?You wouldn?t get these stomach aches if you chewed your food properly.? Vets know, however, that indigestion in snakes and other reptiles often results not from swallowing food whole but from a parasitic infection. The gastrointestinal disease cryptosporidiosis represents a particularly severe problem. Unfortunately, though, diagnosis is extremely difficult. Scientists have now developed a test for the identification of the cryptosporidia that cause the condition, enabling them to assess its prevalence in pet lizards and snakes.

Read full article here... (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110531084625.htm)

This is cool. Hopefully a cure will follow. I was not aware that crypto is that prevalent in captive corn snakes and leopard geckos.

Dan

I've known about it for a long time in leopard geckos, but had never heard of it in corn snakes.

Yeah, crypto in Leos is a bit of a secret. No one wants to ruin their sales. I originally built a 60 animal collection to work on several morph projects a couple of years ago. I acquired animals from over a dozen 'known' breeders.

A year into this, I purchased several additional animals from 3-4 different places to round out my projects. No one ever mentioned that quarantine is mandatory for CB Leos.

One of them was infected and took out most of that collection. Once I discovered what was going on, it was too late. Only after some investigation did I get the epidemic proportions of crypto in Leos.

Crypto can easily infect all the Rhac geckos as well. Not cool at all.