[Gpdd] HEALTH: Virgil and his UTIs

[pat schuett]

Hi everyone,
 
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all piggies and slaves.  As often seems to be the case, I've spent a fair amount of holiday time fretting over my beasties.
 
You may remember me complaining in the past about how many UTIs my piggies have had, and how hard it seems to be for my vets and me to track down the cause.  Well, poor Virgil has another one, less than a month after the last one (strangely enough, he's eating better right now than he has in months and his urine looked good to me, but the vet had suggested a recheck a while after he finished the drugs and says it still shows infection and tests positive for blood).   The "wild card" with Virgie is that he is very sensitive to antibiotics and so far only one (Sulfatrim/Bactrim) has not caused him to stop eating entirely within a week at the most (baytril and chloramphenicol were the ones he quit eating on).  Unfortunately, he was on Sulfatrim for three weeks for the last UTI and if he is suffering from another one so soon, the vet suspects it didn't work for him (he was also starting to eat less well at the end of the three weeks even with
 Sulfatrim).  He was x-rayed for stones with the last UTI and none showed up.   This time the vet is also doing a culture and sensitivity test on his urine so that if /when we pick another antibiotic, at least we can be reasonably sure it will kill this particular bug.
 
Since the last UTI (three of my six pigs had it that time), I've made a few changes.  They were getting cilantro before (which according to the veggie charts on GuineaLynx should be good from a calcium point of view), but I remembered someone on the GPDD years ago who was sure it had caused UTIs in their pigs which disappeared when the cilantro was eliminated.  So I stopped the cilantro (to a chorus of boos from the pig room --- they loved the stuff!).  Now they get chopped celery, a few shreds of carrot and lettuce on their veggie plates, with green and yellow pepper and/or cucumber for snacks in between.  They all get at least 50mg of Vitamin C a day, a chewable human table broken into pieces.  They have always gotten only Oxbow Cavy Cuisine pellets.  They were getting reverse-osmosis filtered water from the machine at the organic grocery store where I work --- I know it is better maintained and cleaned than a lot of the commercial
 grocery-store machines, but since it starts with our local water (which is very hard, i.e. full of minerals) I wondered if that was a factor, and for the past month or so I have been giving them only the Nestle Pure Life bottled water --- the only one which lists the percentage of calcium in their water as 0%.
 
I'm really at my wits' end with this.  Several of the most experienced GPDD folks have been kind enough to e-mail me and help by comparing what I am using for food and housing with their practices (most of these people have had very few if any UTIs among their herd) but in many cases, I seem to be doing almost exactly the same thing with my piggies that they are.  I hate to see my piggers suffering from these horrible bugs and would be happy to go to any amount of trouble to stop it, if only I could figure out what to do!  If you have anything at all to suggest, PLEASE LET ME KNOW --- many thanks in advance...
 
                                                                                                                                                  Pat S.