Day 32

1700: Nothing unremarkable on the piglet front over the last few days.

Isolated some more Group B Salmonella today from last weeks samples, which came from the weaner pigs. As the piglets on the sows don't have the bug, but once weaned they are infected, it must be as weaners that the pigs are first exposed to it.

Had lots of animals come through the PM room this week, many of them through the SSPCA, including:

-Yorkie with bad hair matts around his hind feet, leading to bad lesions on the legs under the matts where the skin was torn and maggots were crawling around - poor dog!
- Dog found dead in a house, of course completely rotten by the time we got hold of it (skin had completely sloughed off its face so we couldn't even idenfify the breed).
-Spaniel with a massive haematoma on the dorsal and left side of the neck - apparently the dog was microchipped and the haematoma occurred within 24 hours. As there are no major arteries or veins in that part of the neck, the dog must have had a clotting disease for that amount of blood leak out, so there was nothing the owner could have done.
-Young rabbit with mucoid enteritis - this was not the first time I'd seen that over the last few weeks, so it happens quite often. On post mortem the gut is filled with mucus, hence the name of the disease, and it is thought to be caused by the bacterium E. coli.

Having far too much fun in pathology!

Day 29

0915: *yawn*

1030: Lots of interesting things today. One piglet had atresia ani, a common problem in piglets and lambs where the anus doesn't form properly. I've seen sheep where this has gone undiagnosed for 3 weeks, by which stage the poor lamb was almost comatose and blown up like a balloon - everything was going in but nothing was coming out.

Another piglet had an orange liver, and it's got everyone stumped. When I'd finished, the liver was removed for histopathology, to join the heart from last week.

Also got two lovely green and black, decomposing piglets that were apparently born 2 days late, although I'm wondering how long they were lying out for before someone noticed they were there. They stank - I didn't really notice the smell (I'm nearly immune to everything a pig can throw at me by now) but it didn't take long for visiting physiologists to notice and evacuate the area! Lightweights.

1230: Last Friday in Bacteriology I looked at the TSI agar, and all samples were negative. So no Salmonella in the farrowing houses. Today I was working with the new samples we collected on Thursday, streaking out plates. And we took a record 31 samples, which took ages to put onto agar.

1700: This is my last week collecting data. I suppose I should be happy that I’m not going to be dissecting dead piglets from now until eternity, but because my project only takes up the mornings, I’m spending the rest of the day in the PM room, and I’m having so much fun I don’t want to leave!

Had a good weekend - on Saturday we went out to lunch, then went to Braehead Shopping Centre (very big) and managed to not get lost, which is an achievement in itself. However, the taxi we called to get us home got lost in the car park. Which says something about the size of the place!

Day 26

1100: Had a sick piglet this morning in one of my boxes - it looked like it had dilated cardiomyopathy with associated congestive heart failure - the heart was enlarged and thin-walled, with fluid in the chest and abdominal cavity and with a fibrinous exudate on the liver, which was enlarged and congested. It got the chief pathology lecturer excited, and he's taken the heart off for histopathology. RM reckons I'll get the results around Christmas time, and the PM room technician, R, thinks it'll be more like Christmas 2008. I think I'll be waiting a while, then.

Today was supposed to be the last day of us collecting material from the farm, but because we started so late on the first week, I'll be collecting material all next week too. I'm not complaining, because it means I get to spend lots more time in the PM room.

1745: This afternoon, a bull mastiff came in from a vet practice in Glasgow, with lymphosarcoma (often called 'Bull Mastuff disease' because this breed seems to get it quite frequently). It was a lesson in anatomy - all the lymph nodes were grossly enlarged and in some cases, visible through the skin.

To those non-vets out there reading this, the locations and names of lymph nodes are something all vet students are expected to know, but because the nodes are usually small they're hard to find, and sometimes even hard to see when pointed out. So to see them through the skin was something very unusual, and all those nodes I'd heard about but never actually seen were suddenly there. And visible. Also visible were nodes I didn't know existed, like the cervical nodes - which must be miniscle on a normal dog, but were bigger than 1.5cm on this poor animal.

2300: Went out for a drink at the local tonight. Good time had. Coke good. Vewy good.

Day 25

1000: Found two mummies in a large, solid lump of mummified tissue today - I sincerely hope the farmer has recorded these in his farm database, because if he hasn't, he needs his eyes retested!

1200: Went out to the farm this morning to get some more samples. We're (fairly) systematically going through the whole farm to try and get an idea of where the Salmonella is lurking. Arrived back and innoculated a few of last weeks' samples into TSI agar, then ran. I have my first driving lesson at 2.30pm today, and I need to have a bath before I go - there's no way any sane person will sit in a warm car with me for two hours in my current state!

1700: Back from driving lesson. I used to have nightmares about driving, so I was more or less terrified for the last two hours. My hands are still shaking!

Day 24

0915: No material this morning.

1100: Spending quite a lot of time in the library this week, it's amazing how many times you can read Farmer's Weekly and still find something interesting in it. And my policy of not looking for RM is working quite well - I keep bumping into him around the vet school without even trying to find him!

1300: Several samples were stuck in urea broth for the night. The colonies looked like Salmonella but will probably turn out to be something like Proteus species again (I'll never know for sure because I'm not looking for Proteus, but it's the most common bacteria that looks like Salmonella on agar).

1500: My best friend from school is arriving here tonight - looking forward to the company!

Day 23

1900: Been neglecting the blog a bit!

Had a quiet weekend - went shopping, wrote up notes, slept...

Had quite a bit of material in yesterday and today, but nothing exceptional!

Don't think I'm going to isolate any Salmonella from the samples we took on Friday, but they were stuck in tetrathionate yesterday, and were streaked out onto plates today, so we shall see what happens.

Day 19

0915: Had material this morning, but nothing to record.

1900: Went back to the farm this afternoon to take some more swabs - this time the farrowing houses were under scrutiny. It was hard to do the piglets - they're even smaller than the growers and finishers, and can't differentiate between being restrained and being killed, so tend to squeal a lot. And, they're cute.

Who could resist?

Went back to the PM room late afternoon, and saw some more interesting cases, including a rottweiler with parvovirus. Thinking that being a veterinary pathologist is actually quite interesting!

Day 18

0910: Another box in this morning.

1030: Four sows farrowed yesterday, so plenty of material in, but no dead piglets. Or mummies.

1230: I've found Salmonella! Finally!

After a few weeks of hunting for a bug we knew was there, I've finally been able to isolate some Group B Salmonella from the finisher pigs. One sample turned positive in the TSI agar, and I ran an agglutination test on it today to identify what Group it was from.

At this point, DEFRA should be notified to say that we isolated Salmonella from the farm, and the samples may be sent on to a Government lab to properly diagnose it.

1700: managed to spend the rest of the day in the PM room again - go me!

Day 17

0915: I have a box!

1000: Two bags this morning - one with nothing (just placenta - no dead/mummified piglets) and one with a mummy. So now I've officially seen my first mummified piglet. I should probably celebrate, but I don't think the PM staff would approve...

1200: Just out of Bacteriology. A few urea tubes stayed yellow, despite being incubated overnight, so these samples were innoculated onto TSI agar this morning. I'll know for definite whether we have Salmonella by tomorrow.

1700: Another afternoon well spent in the PM room. A big dog came in today with severe pressure lesions on its elbows - infection had set in and spread to the joints. I've seen dogs before with calluses on their elbows, but never something as bad as today's case.

Day 16

0915: No material again today - beginning to think that maybe all the sows died suddenly last week and they never told us, or something disastrous like that!

0930: Off to library to await bacteriology.

1230: Innoculated bacterial cultures resembling Salmonella into urea broth today - free now until 4pm when I have to go back and check them.

1800: Had an interesting afternoon in the PM room - the SSPCA brought a badger in that they'd found badly injured by the side of the road. They put in down and brought it to the vet school for the Pathology department to examine.

What sometimes happens with badgers that are baited is that the baiters dump the injured and dead animals at the side of the road, to make it look like they've been hit by cars, disguising their activities. This was a concern with this badger, hence it's arrival in the PM room.

It's injuries were quite extensive - one of it's front paws was almost completely severed and the skull was crushed - how it was still alive when they found it is beyond me. However, we decided these wounds were most likely caused by a car and not by dogs, so there was no case this time.

I went up to Bacteriology this afternoon, but I'm going to leave the cultures in the incubator overnight as they were inconclusive this afternoon.

Day 15

0900: Decided that I spent more time over the last two weeks either looking for RM, or waiting for him, than I actually spent on my project and the extra salmonella assignment put together. So from now on he can find me (this should be fun).

0915: No material this morning, and unfortunately the otters are all done – so it’s off to the library.

1100: Streaking plates today in the Bacteriology lab.

1230: Plates all done. This has to be the most boring job ever in the history of boring jobs. I had 21 samples - which meant 22 plates were to be done. And to make matters worse, to save plates, I'm having to streak two samples onto the one plate - extra concentration required to not go over the entral line!

I've decided that while this is an invaluable experience for me, I don't think I'll be a Bacteriologist when I graduate.

Day 14

Had a nice, quiet, pig-free weekend.

Nothing much else to say!

Day 12

0910: Arrive but no sign of RM.

0915: RM arrives, but there aren't any pigs to look at today (again). I go to Pathology to help with the otters again.

1100: Off to Bacteriology - sticking yesterday's swabs into tetrathionate broth. The mixture is activated by adding iodine to it, then the swabs are placed in the broth and broken off and the container sealed. Tetrathionate is supposed to supress other types of bacteria and only let Salmonella and a few select others grow. Unfortunately, some of the few select others also happen to look very much like Salmonella on an agar plate!

Otters for the rest of the day!

Day 11

0900: Not really expecting RM to be here but I show up outside his office and wait anyway.

0930: Off to the farm this morning, to get some more swabs to analyse for Salmonella. This time, we were taking sample from growers and finisher pigs, which was much harder, because they're smaller and lower to the ground - which means they can wriggle out of your grasp much quicker, and can reach your head with ease. Almost lost a swab inside a pig, but luckily got it back (albeit in two pieces!).

1745: Left the swabs up in Bacteriology, then went to help with more otters. Had one animal with hyperthroidism today - the thyroids were *huge*. They didn't help it much though - it ended up as roadkill in the Shetlands. Another animal we found died of end stage renal failure - the kidneys were enlarged, and there was the textbook melaenia, which occurs close to death.

2100: Make the discovery last night that chicken fried with potatoes, onions and broccoli smells like dead otter. Don't think I'll be eating that combination again for a while!

Day 10

0855: Arrive. No RM.

0920: Go to PM room. Technician (R) just about to start an otter, so I get dressed up and go and help. Help do three otters until it's time for me to go to the lab again.

1100: All the TSI has come back negative, so no Salmonella this time. I just have to enter in the results on the computer system, then it's back to the otters.

1230: Meet RM as I'm heading home for lunch. Confirms the lack of piglets.

1900: Spent the rest of the day looking at otters - getting to be quite familiar with them now!

Day 9

0905: Arrive at vet school. No RM. People with offices in that corridor now recognise me and greet me as they come in.

0930: Give up waiting for RM, and go to the PM room to ask the technician if there are any pigs in for me yet. Nothing there, so I go to the computer room to print off some results sheets.

1000: RM arrives. There was nothing up at the farm today, so I have nothing to do until 11am. We briefly talk about farm economics, then I go to the PM room. The chief lecturer says he will phone me when the otter person arrives for the day. Off to the library.

1100: Some of the urea tubes have come back positive. Or rather, not-negative. The next stage in Salmonella isolation is to innoculate some urea broth into TSI agar. If this agar goes black, then we have Salmonella. Maybe. So I stick loopfuls of broth into the new agar and stick it in the incubator overnight.

1900: After about 20 minutes in the lab, Pathology phoned and told me to come down. I'd finished in the lab for the day, so I went down and we necropsied otters for the rest of the day. We had an interesting case - one otter appeared to have a healed diaphragmatic hernia, as if it had been hit by a car before, and then healed with half the liver in its chest instead of its abdomen. We'll never know, of course, because we could hardly ask the otter! But interesting all the same!

I've also discovered that if you hit an animal with enough force, say, with a car doing 70mph, then the tissue disintegrates. And then there's absolutely no chance of finding any recognisable tissue at all, no matter how good at pathology you are!

Day 8

0900: Arrive at vet school to find three very full boxes awaiting my inspection. Four sows have farrowed and I have 9 piglets to look at. I didn't see anything unusual, most of the piglets were stillborn (i.e. dead at birth), but two had been lain on by their mothers. Which, given the size difference between sow (250kg+) and piglet (1.2kg), is pretty fatal for the piglet.

1100: Up to Bacteriology for the next part of the Salmonella testing. I took the agar plates I streaked out and looked for any traces of bacterial growth - Salmonella colonies are typically white to yellowish with a black centre. There were a few plates with this type of growth, so bacterial colonies from these were innoculated into urea broth. The yellow broth goes pink if there isn't any Salmonella, but stays yellow if there is - it's basically another step in the isolation of the bacteria. This took about 20 minutes again.

1800: I heard the Honours student was coming back today to do the rest of the otters, so I went to see if I could watch and ending up helping out in the PM room for the rest of the day. The otters were weighed and measured, then opened up to identify their cause of death. We weighed some of the organs from each otter, and took lots of tissue samples for pollution analysis, amongst other things. I got to weigh the organs and help take swabs for bacterial culture - had great fun! Think we'll be doing this all week - bring it on!

Day 7

2100: Family away home. :(

Day 6

2300: Another good day - this morning we went to the new Loch Lomond Aquarium and I saw more otters (of the living variety).



Later on we went to Loch Katrine for a trip on the steamship Sir Walter Scott - a good time was had by all!

Day 5

1300: We have results! I arrived today and there was actually material for me to look at: a sow in the old house farrowed yesterday and she had one stillborn piglet. I also had to look at the placenta for mummies, but there was nothing there that I could definitely identify as a mummified foetus.

That took about 20 minutes, and I wasn't due in the Bacteriology department until 11am, so I sat an watched an otter post mortem in the PM room. A zoology student at Glasgow is doing her Honours project on otters, so she has collected 28 (legitimate) dead otters from around Scotland to study. Members of the public who find them bring the otters to centres all over the country, where they're kept frozen - that's how she has so many. Most are roadkill. The student is bringing them here for the PM room staff to look at and analyse.

This otter is a definite roadkill - there's haemorrhage into the abdominal cavity from a ruptured liver, and several of the ribs are fractured. Apparently, being killed on the roads is now a major cause of death in the UK's otter population, now that the rivers and coastline have been cleaned up significantly.

At 11am I went up to Bacteriology to look at my samples. Today I had to streak the tetrathionate broth (now hopefully with lots of bacteria) onto DCA and SS agar plates: there were 16 samples, so that was 32 plates to streak. It has to be one of the most boring things to do in a lab like that - to sit and streak plates out all day!

The plates are now in the incubator and I'm free for the weekend!

2330: I had a nice evening - my family and I went to Edinburgh to pick up one of my cousins who is working there over the summer, then we went out to East Fortune airfield so the boys could see Scotland's Concorde, G-BOAA. We had dinner, then headed back via the Royal Yacht Britannia and the Forth Bridge. Got in quite late, but it was worth it!

Day 4

0900: Arrive eager to look at our first batch of piglet mortalities!

0903: Nothing today, so go home again.

1100: Back at the bacteriology lab to start working on the salmonella samples from yesterday. I actually managed to find my way to the lab without getting lost!

Today I innoculated tetrathionate broth with the swabs we took - which took all of 20 minutes. Starting to like this project!

1700: Can still smell pig from somewhere. Fervently hope I don't have to go to the pig farm too often over the next six weeks.

Day 3

2300: Had a bath and washed all my clothes and I can still smell pig. Contemplating sleeping on the floor in case the bedclothes start to stink of pig as well...

Day 3

0900: Arrive at vet school. RM not here yet. The people who work down the corridor are giving me funny looks.

1000: We talk some more about the project, and look at the performance target figures I found the other day. Then we finally go up to the pig farm, so I can meet the farmer, and take all the measurements I need for my research.

Basically, the farm has one old farrowing house, and one new one. The new house is much better in design than the older one, and is easier to manage. My project involves recording the piglets' deaths in each house for comparison. It is hoped that we can find enough evidence (i.e. that more piglets die in the old house than in the new one) to put forward a case for rebuilding the old house, and making it more accessible and productive than the old design.

So we spend an hour talking to the pig farmer, then an hour running through farrowing pens measuring everything I can think of and taking photos of the pens. And the piglets, because they're cute.

Then we go to the dry sow house and take rectal swabs from three groups of sows and gilts to test for salmonella. It's really hard to hold on to the short, slippy tail of an animal weighing over 250kg with one hand, while trying to take a swab with the other, all the time being dragged around the pen by the indignant animal, and crowded by the others! It's a hard life, being a vet!

1500: Took the samples up to the bacteriology lab, where I'll start working with them tomorrow. It's like a maze in there, I know I'm going to get lost trying to find my way back there tomorrow!

1530: Can still smell pig on me somewhere, despite the fact I was wearing a hat and coveralls and wellies over my clothes. Think I'll be having a bath tonight...

1600: Family coming across to visit me for the weekend - arriving tonight!

Day 2

0900: I arrive at the agreed time. RM not in yet.

0915: I have a supervisor!

1600: A bit of a waste of a day, today. Spent all day around the vet school and vet farm and we're no further on in the project!

The sheep from yesterday which we thought might have scrapie does have scrapie. And to make matters worse, the slurry tank at the farm has developed a dangerous-looking bulge at the base on one side. Also, some of the piglets up at the farm that I'll be studying have a Streptococcal meningitis, which is common enough in pigs, and are quite dehydrated. The farmer's looking for a treatment - the best way to rehydrate them is per rectum using a cow milk fever treatment tube.

We talk about the project (again), then spend an hour running about the vet school chasing up one of the tubes to treat the piglets with. I meet some of the Postgraduates working at the vet school, and one of next years lecturers, JT, whom RM describes as 'Tigger - he bounces about all over the place'! We finally find a tube, then RM has to go up to the vet farm to do some more talking.

I still don't know why I had to go, as this was part of RM's job and nothing to do with my project, but I was told to wander around. I got bored and wet and cold after an hour and went and sat in the car for the second, while RM sat in a nice, warm building and talked to the farm manager about scrapie sheep and bulging slurry tanks.

I think we're actually going to go up to the pig farm tomorrow. I'll get to do something at last!

Day 1

My first day went something like this:

0900: Arrived at vet school at office of supervisor. Nobody there.

0910: Supervisor (RM) arrives and is immediately called away for a meeting. Tells me to go look some figures up and we agree to meet back at his office at 11 to further discuss the project.

1200: After an hour of me sitting in the office, RM arrives back from the meeting. We talk about the project - what we're going to need and what we hope to end up with. I'm going to be recording the numbers of stillbirths, mummified piglets and perinatal mortalities from each sow that farrows during the course of the next 4 weeks. Which requires bags, boxes, permanent markers, the Post Mortem room in the vet school, and lots of patience.

1230: RM called away again - the stockman at the vet farm thinks one of the sheep there has scrapie. It'll not be good news if it is scrapie - the whole flock will have to be tested and possibly culled.

I ended up going home after that - lunch was more inviting than sitting in the library studying. And anyway, I have the figures I need for tomorrow. Bring on the food!