This is VERY interesting to me, as I am having a problem with bumblefoot that I have not seen the likes of doucmented on this board. Most people find it early and pull the plug, but I found it much too late and am not stumbling in the dark.
I have a rooster with a very bad petrified case of bumblefoot. He's been on a month of antibiotics and I believe that the infection is dead, leaving just the hard lump. I do not know if it will ever go away, but by the time I caught it (I knew nothing of it just a month ago), the vet said it was too hard to lance, and that he would probably get reinfected much worse if he could manage it. And I totally believed him, because I had tried soaking him for half an hour the day before and the scab had healed over it so much that I couldn't seem to pull out just the old SCAB. Cutting it? Well, I didn't try, but if the vet wouldn't do it, I doubt that I could have done better.
The vet recommended ichthammol to me, which was a new treatment to me after reading all about it on the boards here. It's a schist tar, often referred to as black salve, and it takes care of boils and staph on humans over a few days.
Thing is that people can bandage themselves and tend to know not to wear the stuff off before it can work. I can't keep this rooster bandaged with vetwrap. He has a history-- he was a gender change rooster and has since he was four months plucked out his own tail feathers, much to my dismay. In fact, I discovered he had bumblefoot when he was finally growing back in tail feathers and he plucked them out the next day. I went to furtively apply Rooster Booster only to discover those lumps <sigh>.
Before this he loved to sit and sun in my lap, and so I hate, hate, hate to medicate him. I was so happy today when he bumbled up to me and jumped in my lap for a bit, even if he didn't let down his guard. One foot seems to be healing and getting smaller after bursting a few weeks ago but the other still hurts him... I really don't know what to do with him now. I guess I could let him recover from the antibiotics for a week and then give him Tylan 50-- I want to make sure the staph is truly DEAD so it doesn't infect his bloodstream and kill him. Also, I don't want it spreading-- the horrid mutant it would be if it survived a month of two different antibiotics.
The only hen I didn't raise that actually predates this flock (a gift from a professor of mine-- lulz) brought the bumblefoot and scaly feet mites and perhaps CRD with her, and so far, that is the only other one to have a bumblefoot mark between her toes. She has also been on a month of antibiotics (amoxicillan 250-500 mg and then tetracycline at the vet's recpmmendation).. I spread ichthammol all over her foot once and her scales started raising off her feet. I don't know yet if it killed all the scaly feet mite that the Ivermectin couldn't handle as they were living in the dead skin at every dosage or if I did something I shouldn't, so she hasn't gotten a second application, so I still don't know if the ichthammol actually works.
I think I actually have some grapefruit seed extract in my cabinet for making potporri, so I'd be glad to apply it externally and see what happens. I would imagine it absorbs instead of sitting on the skin, meaning if I can hold him for a bit, it will absorb.
The girls know he's not fully healthy and I walked out to the coop today to discover my doll of a rooster not only without tail feathers, but completely debearded.
*sigh*
And you know this flock has been absolutely healthy, egg-a-day layers before this-- even through winter? Now I have two girls laying, and four not laying at all. I did a very stupid thing as I am in grad school and during the final push for papers I let a family member take care of them-- probably three weeks. This is before all of this happened. I returned to the coop one night and they all talked quite a bit and acted odd, but I wasn't paying much attention as I was concerned with the amount of weight two of the girls had lost. I read on here a few weeks ago that I was DEAD TO THEM. You would think as someone who tends parrots that I would have thought of that. It was as if I had returned from the dead. I bet this was time when the rooster contracted this, as only a week or two later I discovered that huge lumps.
Merck Vet Manual says:
Although the prognosis for complete recovery is poor, in most cases the foot heals sufficiently to allow adequate locomotion after ~2 mo.
I do see one digit that looks permanently deformed, but not enough to prevent locomotion. We still have another month to go. Wish me luck.
