Not bTB - protostrongyle lungworm in roe

[willie_gunn]

I saw this a few days ago, but cannot let it go!
To recap, no TB indications in any lymph nodes, nothing in the pleural cavity, just some raised patches on the lungs. Yet the carcass was double bagged and incinerated as you and APHA thought it might be TB.
What was the trigger for assuming this, did you miss something out in your account? Lungworm is fairly common, any field guide would tell you this. If any doubt, cutting into the raised areas or palpating would show a different lung tissue substance than TB, as mr Buchan said.
Did you not wish to cut into the lungs and investigate?

I don’t wish to castigate you for being diligent and maybe overly cautious, but surely APHA need a slap around the back of the head, lungworm and TB are two entirely different things, it’s very hard to mix these up. Had they told you it was lungworm, you need not have ditched the carcase. The BDS vet managed to identify lungworm from your photos.

You make some very fair points, and I recognise exactly where your comments are coming from.

It was indeed over-caution on my part that led to the initial call. The simple fact is that I’ve not seen lungworm before. This is in over 25 years of shooting deer on the same ground. It may be common elsewhere, but we’ve not had it here after nearly 2,500 deer culled. If you don’t see it, you won’t necessarily recognise it, however obvious it may be to others.

Regarding identification, I did look in the BDS guide and online, but could find nothing I felt was definitive. The best I could find was from the Wildlife departments in the US, which perhaps is worthy of another thread as to why there is nothing of a similar standard here in the UK - for example a photographic register of diseases in deer.

Similarly, I feel cutting into the lungs would have achieved little - Buchan’s advice is indeed very useful but, as I said, if you don’t have anything to compare it to it is hard to gauge the relative degree of hardness. Sure, if you’re dealing with multiple carcasses on a daily basis then recognition becomes second nature, but when you turn up perhaps one abnormal deer every couple of years it is not so apparent. Also if there is a suspicion of bTB I personally would not be cutting into the lesions to check. I know very well what bTB lesions look like when incised, as the photos I’ve posted on other threads will testify, but cutting into them now is not something I’d do out of idle curiosity.

As to APHA, if the individual sent out to take the samples didn’t recognise it as lungworm, I’m personally not going to die in a ditch over it. At least locally they seem to predominantly come from Southern or Eastern Europe, so they may have limited experience of wild deer in the UK. My point is that they have been excellent to deal with, and stalkers should have nothing to fear by contacting them.

Having now had 4 muntjac in the same couple of hectares with confirmed bTB, the simple truth is that I wasn’t going to take any chances. Perhaps if we hadn’t had any bTB cases before I may well have thought nothing of it, but at the end of the day you have to judge the carcass there on the ground in front of you. I don’t begrudge needlessly incinerating a carcass, and any personal embarrassment over misdiagnosis is more than outweighed by the relief that it was not another case of bTB.

That’s also why I felt it worth starting this thread - if others here can learn from my “mistakes” then something positive will have come out of it.

Thanks again for your comments.

 

[South of the M4]

Willie, I understand your position and applaud your willingness to incinerate a carcass, therefore taking a loss, when others would have pushed it through a dealer.
APHA, however, don’t come out of this well in my opinion.
As a public body, should they not have some sort of triage in place to avoid unnecessary and expensive collection and testing?
We are all paying for this.
Maybe European vets haven’t seen many deer as you charitably suggest, but sheep, pigs and cattle all suffer similarly from various lungworms. It’s not an exotic condition.
This should have been picked up and dealt with by phone/ email and nipped in the bud, thus saving the taxpayer money and yourself time and a carcass.

 

[willie_gunn]

Willie, I understand your position and applaud your willingness to incinerate a carcass, therefore taking a loss, when others would have pushed it through a dealer.
APHA, however, don’t come out of this well in my opinion.
As a public body, should they not have some sort of triage in place to avoid unnecessary and expensive collection and testing?
We are all paying for this.
Maybe European vets haven’t seen many deer as you charitably suggest, but sheep, pigs and cattle all suffer similarly from various lungworms. It’s not an exotic condition.
This should have been picked up and dealt with by phone/ email and nipped in the bud, thus saving the taxpayer money and yourself time and a carcass.

Again you make a very fair point, and I certainly wouldn’t dispute your opinion, but in the grand scheme of things I honestly don’t think it’s important enough to lose sleep over.

Personally I have far more admiration for APHA’s ability to get someone to come out the very next day to visit the home of an amateur deer stalker and collect samples than I have disappointment that they didn’t immediately diagnose it as lungworm! These things happen, and hopefully the person involved will have learned just as much from this as I have.

I process all the carcasses I shoot, so sending it for incineration represented some lost income, but I am fortunate in that I have a separate full time job. On top of this there was the £18 paid to the local hunt for the carcass disposal, but again that’s money well spent in my opinion because they provide an invaluable service to farmers in collecting fallen stock. Regardless, any financial cost was more than repaid in terms of education.

As it is, I could not in good faith have put it into the food chain anyway, as my personal philosophy is “if I wouldn’t eat it, I won’t sell it”.

 

[Buchan]

Willie, I understand your position and applaud your willingness to incinerate a carcass, therefore taking a loss, when others would have pushed it through a dealer.
APHA, however, don’t come out of this well in my opinion.
As a public body, should they not have some sort of triage in place to avoid unnecessary and expensive collection and testing?
We are all paying for this.
Maybe European vets haven’t seen many deer as you charitably suggest, but sheep, pigs and cattle all suffer similarly from various lungworms. It’s not an exotic condition.
This should have been picked up and dealt with by phone/ email and nipped in the bud, thus saving the taxpayer money and yourself time and a carcass.

I disagree. In any surveillance project there are samples that are negative, there have to be. Getting a negative here, with the photos of quite extensive pathology, is very useful to learn from. And, in a TB hotspot, testing this is a wise move. Showing that deer are tested and are negative helps with the overall TB picture.

 

[willie_gunn]

Lungworm is fairly common, any field guide would tell you this.

@South of the M4 - my turn to return to this, and to perhaps plead some mitigation

Your comment above has been nagging away at me, not least because I went back to the bank of DSC1 questions and found this:

Lung worms are often found in wild roe deer. Symptoms include:
a. Clear cysts on the surface of the lungs
b. Purple inflammation throughout the lungs
c. Bleeding and clotted blood in the lung tissue
d. Whitish/pale grey solid patches in the lung tissue especially at lower edges

Notwithstanding the fact that, as mentioned, I have not encountered lungworm before, it got me wondering whether that description is really sufficient to allow identification?

This encouraged me to order a copy of the latest version of the BDS Field Guide to Deer Diseases. It's an excellent little book, and going through it I found these pages on lungworm:



"..light patches, or greyish dead looking areas..." is not overly helpful, and the photo used doesn't look much like what I encountered either.

I then had a look at the relevant pages of a book that I honestly consider to be the benchmark when it comes to identifying diseases in deer, since it is broader in terms of the diseases discussed, far better illustrated with examples, and way more extensive in terms of the descriptions given:





Again, I am not sure that, based on the description alone, I could necessarily be expected to diagnose what I found correctly. To be clear, this is in no way a criticism of the book itself, which deserves a place on every deer stalker's bookshelf, but rather my unfamiliarity in terms of identifying what I was looking at.

I then moved on to the Best Practice Guides, of which I am a big proponent, but whilst both the Scottish and the England & Wales versions mention lungworm, neither offer much assistance when it comes to practical identification of the symptoms of lungworm:

Home | Wild Deer Best Practice Guidance

bestpracticeguides.org.uk

https://thedeerinitiative.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/carcass-inspection.pdf

I then reverted to Google, as I'd also searched online when I was attempting to identify what it was that I had found in the roe buck above.

Even the illustrations in the most detailed study I could find ("Why are our roe deer short of breath? – prevalence and promotive factors of lung parasites in roe deer Capreolus capreolus in south-eastern Germany") didn't particularly help, and again I would argue that the photos used to illustrate the paper don't really resemble what I found:



In fact the closest image I could find was in a research paper on "Parasitic pneumonia in roe deer in Cornwall", but I would still maintain that it is not definitive either:



I guess what I am attempting to do here is point out that, when encountering a disease in a deer carcass that is lying there in front of the stalker, nothing can replace experience - not a field guide, not Best Practice, and not the internet. Familiarisation with the various signs of diseases is best learned by studying as many examples as possible, ideally at first hand but, if not, through as many detailed photos as possible. Written descriptions are limited in terms of how they can assist in diagnosis from a practical perspective, and can sometimes seem contradictory in how symptoms are described. Whilst a picture paints a thousand words, it is also true that the photos used, for obvious reasons, can never be exhaustive.

At the end of the day it is important that, whenever a stalker encounters something they are unfamiliar with in an animal, they record it and then seek to educate themselves about what they have encountered - whether through researching books, using online resources, or discussing it with their colleagues and peers through forums such as this one. The collective and specialised experience they are likely to encounter in these groups brings a far higher possibility of correct diagnosis, since what is unfamiliar to one person may be commonplace to another.

 

[South of the M4]

I disagree. In any surveillance project there are samples that are negative, there have to be. Getting a negative here, with the photos of quite extensive pathology, is very useful to learn from. And, in a TB hotspot, testing this is a wise move. Showing that deer are tested and are negative helps with the overall TB picture.

But the pathology in the photos is of lungworm? Sure it's useful to learn from, but it was flagged up to APHA as possible TB. The duty or collecting vet should have known the difference and advised accordingly. But having collected I guess they were obliged to test.
If APHA want to get an overall picture from a TB hotspot, why not liaise with an Estate in the area on a cull day or weekend. Then 20 or so carcasses could be sampled at the same time. That would be much more beneficial.

 

[South of the M4]

@South of the M4 - my turn to return to this, and to perhaps plead some mitigation

Your comment above has been nagging away at me, not least because I went back to the bank of DSC1 questions and found this:

Lung worms are often found in wild roe deer. Symptoms include:
a. Clear cysts on the surface of the lungs
b. Purple inflammation throughout the lungs
c. Bleeding and clotted blood in the lung tissue
d. Whitish/pale grey solid patches in the lung tissue especially at lower edges

Notwithstanding the fact that, as mentioned, I have not encountered lungworm before, it got me wondering whether that description is really sufficient to allow identification?

This encouraged me to order a copy of the latest version of the BDS Field Guide to Deer Diseases. It's an excellent little book, and going through it I found these pages on lungworm:

View attachment 389177

"..light patches, or greyish dead looking areas..." is not overly helpful, and the photo used doesn't look much like what I encountered either.

I then had a look at the relevant pages of a book that I honestly consider to be the benchmark when it comes to identifying diseases in deer, since it is broader in terms of the diseases discussed, far better illustrated with examples, and way more extensive in terms of the descriptions given:

View attachment 389182

View attachment 389183

Again, I am not sure that, based on the description alone, I could necessarily be expected to diagnose what I found correctly. To be clear, this is in no way a criticism of the book itself, which deserves a place on every deer stalker's bookshelf, but rather my unfamiliarity in terms of identifying what I was looking at.

I then moved on to the Best Practice Guides, of which I am a big proponent, but whilst both the Scottish and the England & Wales versions mention lungworm, neither offer much assistance when it comes to practical identification of the symptoms of lungworm:

Home | Wild Deer Best Practice Guidance

bestpracticeguides.org.uk

https://thedeerinitiative.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/carcass-inspection.pdf

I then reverted to Google, as I'd also searched online when I was attempting to identify what it was that I had found in the roe buck above.

Even the illustrations in the most detailed study I could find ("Why are our roe deer short of breath? – prevalence and promotive factors of lung parasites in roe deer Capreolus capreolus in south-eastern Germany") didn't particularly help, and again I would argue that the photos used to illustrate the paper don't really resemble what I found:

View attachment 389185

In fact the closest image I could find was in a research paper on "Parasitic pneumonia in roe deer in Cornwall", but I would still maintain that it is not definitive either:

View attachment 389198

I guess what I am attempting to do here is point out that, when encountering a disease in a deer carcass that is lying there in front of the stalker, nothing can replace experience - not a field guide, not Best Practice, and not the internet. Familiarisation with the various signs of diseases is best learned by studying as many examples as possible, ideally at first hand but, if not, through as many detailed photos as possible. Written descriptions are limited in terms of how they can assist in diagnosis from a practical perspective, and can sometimes seem contradictory in how symptoms are described. Whilst a picture paints a thousand words, it is also true that the photos used, for obvious reasons, can never be exhaustive.

At the end of the day it is important that, whenever a stalker encounters something they are unfamiliar with in an animal, they record it and then seek to educate themselves about what they have encountered - whether through researching books, using online resources, or discussing it with their colleagues and peers through forums such as this one. The collective and specialised experience they are likely to encounter in these groups brings a far higher possibility of correct diagnosis, since what is unfamiliar to one person may be commonplace to another.

Willie, I admire your thorough investigation on this. I don't think you'll find an explanation or definitive description that encompasses all lungworm in every case. As animals with lungworm will present slightly differently, the best that can be put in print is the general descriptions you've found.

If this doesn't work for you, maybe approach from a different angle - what the condition is not. If you've eliminated anything else it could be, maybe you've thought of pneumonia, TB abscesses, Hydatid cysts, pleurisy, water inhalation (I've recovered some shot deer from streams on my permissions), then you are left with, in this case, lungworm, especially as the rest of the carcass is as clean as a whistle.
I agree this is all fine and dandy to pick over the possibilities here, but at last light in a muddy field it's not so easy. But that is another topic.

 

[Buchan]

But the pathology in the photos is of lungworm? Sure it's useful to learn from, but it was flagged up to APHA as possible TB. The duty or collecting vet should have known the difference and advised accordingly. But having collected I guess they were obliged to test.
If APHA want to get an overall picture from a TB hotspot, why not liaise with an Estate in the area on a cull day or weekend. Then 20 or so carcasses could be sampled at the same time. That would be much more beneficial.

I'm not sure why you feel there was a problem in what was done. A stalker with suspicion reported the findings. The duty vet decided to test - just in case. Different vet, different day, different location maybe they wouldn't have tested. But the vet's decision to test is not unreasonable, especially in a hotspot.

 

[willie_gunn]

If APHA want to get an overall picture from a TB hotspot, why not liaise with an Estate in the area on a cull day or weekend. Then 20 or so carcasses could be sampled at the same time. That would be much more beneficial.

Just to mention that we have the records for all deer culled on the estate going back to '97, which now amounts to close on 2,500 deer.

As with the recent serosurveillance study on tick-borne viruses, we could easily provide post-mortem samples from all deer if needed, but to date it's only been the 4 muntjac with confirmed bTB that have turned up as part of the regular post-shot inspections and been notified to APHA. And now this roe.

We're watching what happens with the incidence of bTB, as from this year the large game shoot that previously was running on the estate is no longer in operation, so we're interested to see what effect - if any - that might have.

 

[User100]

What would the view be on these?


Fallow doe, very thin carcass, hard lumps in mesentery as photo, hard portions of lungs as photo, all other lymph normal, no signs in the ribcage.

 

[South of the M4]

What would the view be on these?
View attachment 391309View attachment 391311

Fallow doe, very thin carcass, hard lumps in mesentery as photo, hard portions of lungs as photo, all other lymph normal, no signs in the ribcage.

You'd have a good suspicion of bTB. Aside from the (probable) pus/gritty content of the mesenteries and the white areas in the lungs which also may be filled with pus or hard, gritty material, it could be chronic pneumonia, too. Either way, something was dragging the condition of the deer down if it was very thin - it should be in very condition this time of year.
Call APHA.

 

[User100]

You'd have a good suspicion of bTB. Aside from the (probable) pus/gritty content of the mesenteries and the white areas in the lungs which also may be filled with pus or hard, gritty material, it could be chronic pneumonia, too. Either way, something was dragging the condition of the deer down if it was very thin - it should be in very condition this time of year.
Call APHA.

Thank you.