Ed Lilley said:
Necropsy or not Lynn sold the boa, It's his responsibility.
It seems a lot of the context of this thread is selectivly picked through and folks seem to see what they want to, once they have picked a side....
The underling FACT is Lynn sold a boa far below any kind of reasonable health standard, and doesn't seem to care it has resulted in unhappy customers, and dead boas.
Folks get a boa book out and tell me what the symtoms I described sounds like to you. Regardless of your findings ask yourself if those symtoms are what you want in a boa you just purchased. Ask yourself if this is the kind of deal you want to be involved in.
I have never personaly done business with Lynn, It was a friend of mine who did. I have no personal beef against Lynn, but I do not care for this kind of business. Thats where my beef is.....
Making a mistake is one thing, but not making up for it is another.
Ed, the described symptoms do apply to IBD, but they can also be caused by several other disorders. Definitively diagnosing IBD is not an easy thing to do. If the snake was frozen before the tissue samples were taken, it could render them worthless for cytology. In order to diagnose IBD (Inclusion Body Disease), samples from certain organs are stained using either Wright-Giemsa staining or a hemotoxylin and eosin staining (preferred). The sample is then examined for intracytoplasmic eosinophilic inclusion bodies under a light microscope, or by electron microscopy. Inclusion bodies can also
occasionally be found in a blood smear using Wright-Giemsa where they will be found within peripheral lymphocytes. That in conjunction with a white cell count of less that 30,000/ul is pretty definitive. The problem with all of this is that the absence of inclusion bodies does not mean that the snake didn't have IBD and conversely the presence of cell inclusions does not necessarily mean that it does have IBD, although intracytoplasmic inclusion bodies are fairly diagnostic. Currently there is no serological assay. Isolates of retrovirus have been obtained from infected snakes, but none have been proven causative.
Other things that can cause symptoms mimicking some symptoms associated with IBD are exposure to certain toxins, herpes virus infections, etc. This is especially true with the neurological symptoms such as "stargazing", head tremors, convulsions, inablity to right itself if turned upside-down, etc. With Herpes virus infection, no cytoplasmic inclusions will be found, but intranuclear inclusions will be present as revealed by electron microscopy.
In boas, the neurological symptoms are usually preceded by or accompanied by other symptoms, such as regurgitation, stomatitis, pneumonia, skin sarcomas, and leukemia.
If you have a boa that is exhibiting the neurological symptoms, regurgitation and respiratory illness, chances are good that it is a case of IBD.
It IS possible to diagnose the disease in living boas by taking a liver biopsy for cytology. Sometimes there will be hemorragic lesions (nodules) in the esophagus of affected Pythons which may be biopsied with flexible endoscopy and examine for intracytoplasmic inclusion bodies. Otherwise in Pythons, the inclusion bodies are within CNS tissues (neurons), so antemortem diagnosis may not be possible.
Any disorder that causes these symptoms and eventually death should be treated as communicable and the infected animals should be isolated and definitely should not be sold.
and when you get your new stock (ball pythons) up and going, then come back around. I really think Lynn would be the first to say if there was anything wrong with any of his animals. That is the kind of guy he is.