Diseases and Medications - Parasites, Bacteria, Viruses, Medications, Treatments, Stress, Pathogens
SOAP is not just a lard based hand scrub - it stands for Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan. Richard Carlson, wrote a very useful article on this, and it can help ALL Koi keepers to deal with problems.
CKKs (and other knowledgable hobbyists) are always telling others that they have to be careful about the use of antibiotics in our Koi. The problem is that if you use an antibiotic and it is the wrong one (you can find out the correct anitbiotic to use by doing a swab of the infection site and sending it to a lab to be cultured), or if you don't use all the recommended doses, then you don't kill all the bacteria. The remaining bacteria are the ones that were hardest to kill, and they multiply. Now what started as a simple bacterial infection has become a problem, and when the local dog or bird or frog (or fill-in-the-blank with any critter that visits your pond) passes the resistent bacteria along, we end up with bugs so bad that they can't be killed with any known antibiotic, and that kills people.
This article was first posted in Wired magazine by Maryn McKenna on April 15, 2011. It is not about Koi, but about resistance in food animals. SCARY stuff, and I think it illustrates the point!
This information was first published in Question of the Week.
One of my mentors in the Koi hobby was a guy called Roark, who used to have the most fabulous web site! This article was originally posted on www.click2roark.com. This is still considered the bible on Potassium Permanganate use. PLEASE READ COMPLETELY BEFORE EVER USING PP!
Last summer, my Koi finally reached sexual maturity - and spawned for the first time!
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