What is canine distemper?
1. What is canine distemper?
Canine distemper is a highly contagious and fatal infectious disease caused by canine distemper virus (CDV). In the beginning of the disease, the dogs showed biphasic fever, leukopenia, and acute nasal catarrh signs. After that, there are other feature symptoms like bronchitis, catarrhal pneumonia, severe gastroenteritis, and neurological. And few cases will have hyperkeratosis in nose and foot pads.
2. How does canine distemper spread?
Sick dogs are the most important source of infection for CDV disease. The virus exists in large quantities in nasal juice and saliva. And it is also found in tears, blood, cerebrospinal fluid, lymph nodes, liver, spleen, pericardial fluid, chest and ascites. It can be excreted through urine for a long time and pollute the surrounding environment. The main way of transmission is direct contact between disease dogs and healthy dog. It is contracted through airborne droplets through the respiratory tract or through the digestive tract through contaminated food.
3.What are the symptoms of canine distemper?
The incubation period of canine distemper virus is different from the source of infection. Normally from the same animals species is 3-6 days and from heterogeneous animals can be 30-90 days long due to the adaptation period.
The canine distemper symptoms are relevant with the virulence of virus, environmental condition, host’s age and immune status. 50%-70% of CDV infection presents with subclinical symptoms, manifested as fatigue, anorexia, fever and upper respiratory tract infection. Severe distemper infection is more common in unvaccinated puppies aged 84 to 112 days. The body temperature of sick dogs rises and becomes a biphasic fever type. That means the body temperature reaches about 40°C at the beginning of the disease. Then it drops to normal temperature after 1-2 days. And it will rises again after 2-3 days and last for several weeks.
4. How to diagnose canine distemper?
The clinical symptoms of this disease are diverse and the bacterial infection is often caused. Or it mixed with canine parvovirus and canine adenovirus, which makes the disease diagnosis is very difficult. Currently the easy and convenient diagnosis method is Immunochromatographic assay.
Shenungtex Rapid Canine Distemper Virus Ag Test Kit is a sandwich lateral flow immunochromatographic assay for the qualitative detection of canine Distemper virus (CDV Ag) from dog’s secretions or serum. It’s easy to use and get the result in few minutes. And the interpretation result is easy to read:
If the C line and T line appear no matter it’s clear or vague, it shows positive.
If only C line appears, it shows negative.
If no line appear or only T line appears, it’s invalid.
5. How to prevent canine distemper?
Canine distemper is highly contagious, harmful and has a high mortality rate (accounting for more than 80% of the affected dogs). Therefore, in order to prevent the spread of the epidemic, the sick dogs must be quickly and strictly isolated. Then use caustic soda, bleach powder to thoroughly disinfect. It should stop the transfer of animals and unrelated personnel exchanges. For presumed healthy animals and other animals threatened by the epidemic, emergency vaccination with canine distemper hyperimmune serum or pediatric measles vaccine can be considered. After the epidemic situation is stable, the canine distemper vaccine should be injected again.
