| Livestock Disease Summaries | नेपाली भाषा |
Managing Dehydration: Rehydration Therapy
Dehydration can result from many cases, including such simple things like owners failing to give them adequate water to drink. Diarrhea is one of the most common cause of dehydration and can result from numerous causes, including bacterial and viral infections, parasitism, nutritional deficiencies or excesses and various toxins. In many cases, severe diarrhea can be fatal, especially in young animals. However, it is very important to recognize that in almost all cases, animals (and people) that die from diarrhea actually die from dehydration and electrolyte imbalances, not from the diarrhea itself. If you can keep the animal hydrated, the diarrhea will usually resolve, and the animal recover from the diarrhea.
One of the most important medical advances of last century – a breakthrough that has undoubtedly saved tens of millions of human lives - was the demonstration that people suffering from cholera could be saved by treatment with simple and inexpensive oral rehydration liquids. Cholera is a bacterial disease that causes severe diarrhea and, if untreated, death rates from cholera are high. Cholera patients die from dehydration and if you can replace the water and salts that they lose from having diarrhea, almost all such people will recover (image of cholera ward courtesy of Wikipedia Commons).
How do you recognize dehydration?
There are two obvious signs of dehydration in all animals:
- The eyes are sunken in: The more severe the dehydration, the more obvious this sign will be. The image to the right shows severe dehydration in a calf and its eyes are severely sunken.
- Abnormal “skin tent” test: In animals that have normal hydration, if you pinch a fold of skin on its shoulder or neck and let it go, that tent of skin will very rapidly snap back into a flat appearance. As animals become more and more dehydrated, the amount of time it takes for a tent of skin to snap back to being flat will be longer and longer – in other words, in a severely dehydrated animal, if you pinch a fold of skin into a tent and then let it go, it will stay in that folded position for many seconds.
In addition to sunken eyes and an abnormal skin tent response, dehydrated animals are usually depressed and, if the dehydration is severe, they may not be able to stand and will die. Young animals with diarrhea often also have too much acid in their system (called acidosis). When calves with acidosis stand up, they often stagger or fall down.
Treatment of Dehydration
Dehydration can range from mild to severe and it is always important to recognize this condition and start treatment as soon as possible.
Animals that are severely dehydrated and unable to stand and move should be treated with intravenous fluid therapy with saline or, even better, a balanced electrolyte solution such as lactated Ringers solution to rapidly relieve the dehydration and electrolyte imbalances. Intravenous rehydration solutions are somewhat expensive and need to be administered by a skilled technician or veterinarian.
In animals with mild or moderate dehydration, oral delivery of fluids – called oral rehydration therapy – is highly effective and an inexpensive way to relieve the dehydration and prevent the dehydration from becoming worse.
There are several commercial powders that can be mixed with water for oral rehydration therapy, and these are very effective. Alternatively, there are several homemade solutions can be very effective in correcting dehydration. A very simple solution can be prepared by mixing the following ingredients in one liter of clean water:
- 1 tablespoon of glucose (do not use table sugar – cattle cannot digest that)
- 1 teaspoon of salt
- 1 teaspoon baking soda (this is especially useful in animals with acidosis)
If the dehydrated animal is still drinking you can simply provide the oral rehydration solution for it to drink. If the animal will not drink, you may need to administer the rehydration solution by stomach tube.
In the common case of dehydrated nursing calves or goats with diarrhea, a good plan is to continue letting it nurse its mother or to feed it milk morning and evening, but also feed the same volume of oral rehydration fluid in the middle of the day.
Last important tip: DO NOT take water away from animals with diarrhea. This is the worst treatment possible for diarrhea.
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