Vomiting/Regurging Questions

[Roman]

Hi Sandy,

an additional information about diagnostics of cryptosporidiosis. I don’t know about the US, here in Germany you can buy a test set (basically just a small tube where you put some fecal material and an envelope) which you can send to a test laboratory. They do some standard parasitological tests and an IFT (immune fluorescence test) to find cryptosporidium. This test shows if there are cryptosporidium present, but it is not possible to identify them with this test.

For identification you need to do a PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction). One of my snakes showed cryptosporidium, so I had to look for a laboratory which would do this test and found the veterinary medical institute of the university Vienna in Austria. They did this test and found no cryptosporidium, so in this case it was just some cryptosporidium the snake got with its last food item but no infection of the snake itself. If there had been cryptosporidium present they could have identified them.

Roman