🦠 Diseases & Zoonoses · 8 min
Quarantine and the diseases you will see
Why this matters
Quarantine is the single practice that keeps one arrival from emptying your facility, and its length is not arbitrary.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to
- Set a quarantine period using incubation time
- Order your daily routine to protect healthy animals
- Recognize the presentation of the common wildlife diseases
How long, and in what order
Quarantine should last as long as the incubation period of the most common disease in that species. If distemper can take up to 21 days to show, distemper-susceptible species are quarantined at least that long. A ten-day quarantine is not sufficient to rule out rabies: signs usually appear within 15 to 25 days but the incubation period is highly variable and can be much longer.
Bedding, cleaning implements and feed bowls for the quarantine area are separate from the regular in-patients. Quarantine animals are treated last, after the healthier animals, so bedding, dishes, hands, shoes and clothes do not carry contamination from sick to healthy.
Presentations to recognize
| Presentation | Think |
|---|---|
| Gray fox wandering aimlessly, convulsive head movements, discharge from nose and eyes, no fear of people | Distemper. Contagious, viral, no cure, almost always fatal. Euthanasia is the humane answer, and be very cautious about bringing it into your facility. Its signs resemble rabies. |
| Coyote missing a lot of fur, sores over the body, foul smell | Sarcoptic mange. Treatable, usually with ivermectin or a similar drug, after a skin scrape identifies the mite. Transferred readily among social mammals. |
| Young fox with a domed skull, protruding eyes, seizures, cannot locate food under its nose | Hydrocephalus. Congenital and untreatable. |
| Mallard unable to fly or move its legs, nictitating membranes swollen and covering the eyes | Botulism (limber-neck), from the toxin of Clostridium botulinum, an anaerobic bacterium. Progressive, often fatal paralysis. |
| Cheesy, proliferative lesions in the mouth of a raptor | Trichomoniasis, a protozoal parasite (Trichomonas gallinae) contracted by eating infected doves and pigeons. Requires microscopic diagnosis: you cannot distinguish it from candidiasis by eye. |
| White, foul-smelling necrotic patches in the esophagus and crop | Candidiasis, a yeast overgrowth. Often follows long-term antibiotic therapy, which kills the normal flora. |
| Any mammal with CNS signs | Possible rabies. Euthanize, follow health department protocol, confirm whether any human was exposed. |
Two terms
Epizootic: an outbreak affecting many animals of one species at the same time, the animal equivalent of an epidemic. Newcastle disease is a contagious epizootic viral disease of most bird species, transmitted by airborne particles, nasal secretions and ingestion.
Avian influenza refers to a collection of virus strains (16 H types and 9 N types), divided into low and high pathogenicity, and not all of them cause disease in people.
This lesson is part of the NY Wildlife Rehabilitator Exam course. Open it in the course to answer the retrieval checks that go with it, track what you have read, and quiz the whole unit. Lessons, quizzes and the glossary are free.