Coping With Canine Distemper

We brought home a young Australian Cattle Dog from a nasty rural California shelter after our old cattle dog had died at 16. He had a little cough, but we assumed it was kennel cough. He was put on Clavamox. We think he had been in the shelter for about two weeks when we got him, and he had been vaccinated against the usual infectious diseases upon being admitted to the shelter. He tested negative for heartworm at his first vet visit.

He got quite a bit sicker over the next few days, eating but losing weight, and coughing quite a bit more. I took him back in, and they changed his antibiotics to Baytril and Amoxicillin. They X-rayed his chest, and said it didn’t look like he had pneumonia, although he clearly had some awful lung inflammation. They also had me administer subcutaneous fluids every night. They sent blood samples off to be tested for distemper and valley fever.

Four days later, the vet called to say he had tested positive for heartworm, which confused me since his first test had been negative. I now know this might be due to the greater sensitivity of the reference lab test (which can detect antigen from a very low worm burden). We talked about the heartworm treatment.

The next day, the head vet at the clinic called to say he had also tested positive for distemper but she thought this was questionable for several reasons. First, he had just had the vaccine, which might cause a false positive (the lab ran a PCR test). Second, although he was coughing, he didn’t show the other typical clinical signs, including low appetite, depression, vomiting, diarrhea, eye or nasal discharge (he was coughing up a little blood). She swabbed his conjunctiva of the eye for another test and took some more blood for an IgM test. She said if the eye test was negative, it didn’t rule out distemper, but if it was positive, he really had it. We don’t know the results yet. She moved him from amoxicillin back to Clavamox plus Baytril.

He is eating four big meals a day, seems alert and coordinated. His stools are soft, but not diarrhea, and he hasn’t vomited at all. His cough seems to be moving out of his chest and more into his nose (he does a weird snorting thing for a few seconds). It seems like he’s not showing any of the clinical signs other than cough and low fever, which are signs of so many other things.

We’re waiting to hear the results of the other tests, and hoping that he doesn’t really have it.