VPT 421: Veterinary Toxicology (2+0)

CLINICAL EVIDENCES

• This involves the signs presented to the veterinarian. If the animal is already dead, the source of clinical evidence is the owner, animal attendant or others who have seen the animal at the time of death.
• Caution should be exercised while considering the clinical evidences based on the observations of an untrained person.
• The symptoms noticed differ from animal to animal due to the differences in individual response at a given dose level, the amount of poison consumed, number of doses consumed and the interval between them, whether the animal has eaten recently or not, whether the diet contained factors influencing the solubility and absorption of the poison, general state of health of the animal, age and breed of the animal.
• Sometimes the animals show atypical symptoms. In mass poisoning incidents the clinical signs are likely to be of importance.
• In addition to the clinical signs, diagnostically helpful information can be gathered from the odour of the breath or colour of urine or faeces of the affected animal.
• The odour of breath will be phenolic after ingestion of phenol or materials such as creosote, bitter almonds after cyanide, garlic after phosphorous and mouse like after hemlock.
• The colour of the urine will be dark green after ingestion of phenolic compounds, red after phenothiazine, brown or black after acorns and deep yellow after picric acid.
• The colour of the faeces is dark green due to the formation of a copper-chlorophyll complex in animals suffering from acute copper poisoning.
• Colour of blood and mucous membrane will be cherry red in carbon monoxide, bright red in cyanide and chocolate brown in nitrite and chlorate poisoning.