dog fever web pages

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I decided it was high time I did a bit of surfing, to see what's out there on fever in dogs.

Not much, as it turns out. At least, I didn't find a lot on what I was pretty sure were reputable sites....

This first one talks about trying to diagnose the cause of fever, when antibiotics have failed. It says that the percentages for reasons people have fevers are well documented (this percentage for infection, this percentage for cancer, this percentage for auto-immune, this percentage not ever diagnosed, etc), but the percentages are less well documented for dogs, and that different studies have found different percentages.

I'll confess I didn't read it word for word; I skipped to the most interesting paragraphs, like "Results."

It looked to me like all the dogs in their study, which had not responded to antibiotics, responded to predisone, and that none of them had ever had unknown-cause fever again after a course of prednisone. That seems too easy; I must not have read it correctly...................... If that is a correct interpretation, I wonder when we bring on the pred.......................

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1764186



I knew I'd read about flu in dogs, beginning in racing greyhounds. Well, *identified* in racing greyhounds.

So this one is about that, and the acute kind sounds a bit like Wibbs, only he's not been coughing more than usual. (He'd got chronic congestion, always in his head, and often in his lungs, which is probably allergies. It comes and goes. I believe it is worse after rain, and worse at this time of year -- hay fever season. But it comes and goes so much that it is very hard to tell what makes it worse or better.)

http://www.vetmed.wsu.edu/depts_Waddl/dx/K9Influenza.aspx



For the last several days I have thought his breathing, when resting or asleep, has been a bit labored, and have wondered if it were fast (but didn't track down the info on what "normal" would be)............

I had a surprisingly hard time finding a site that I think is probably reliable (if it has ads all over it, I am oddly suspicious.....). And there was lots of variation from page to page.

Here's a vet school page, but somehow I don't think 10-24 breaths per minute is really very useful info..... All y'all, go count your dogs' resting respiration rate, so you'll have a baseline, should you find yourself in my position.....................

http://www.vet.upenn.edu/RyanHospital/K9FirstAid/K9NormalVitalSigns/tabid/1373/Default.aspx

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