Surviving Crypto

[geckomantherealest]

I have lost a few animals due to crypto. My current animals are testing negative but I worry about stopping the spread for good since I know crypto is hard to detect consistently. Has anyone experienced a crypto outbreak and recovered from it? If so how long did it take before you stopped seeing it pop back up? I detected the first animal shortly after it came in about 1 year ago. I lost one animal that fall and put down another one at the same time that was right next to it and tested positive. It's been about 6 months since I've found a positive animal but I am still dreadfully worried.

 

[acpart]

My entire colony got crypto 9 years ago. I had most of them tested and they were all positive. Because of that I had to stop breeding geckos and with a few exceptions stopped increasing my collection. During the first year I lost about half of my geckos, which included over 30 who had hatched in my home: I don't mean that I lost 30 hatchlings, but that I had an unusually large number of geckos due to all the hatchlings, which I now couldn't ethically sell. Since then, I've lost a few geckos every year to crypto. I haven't had any deaths in over a year, but they're all still positive even if they test negative sometimes because they're not shedding parasite. Crypto is not going to die out; it's there to stay. With a group of crypto geckos you have 2 choices: have all your geckos put down, completely clean every enclosure with an ammonia solution and let them air dry, throw away all your gecko furniture and get new stuff and then start again. The other choice is to stop adding to the collection and enjoy the geckos that aren't showing symptoms for as long as they're healthy. At the moment I have 26 geckos and 1 bearded dragon. Except for the bearded dragon, who's almost 6, and an electric blue day gecko who's about 2, the rest of the geckos range in age from 9 to nearly 20 --Spencer, one of my crested geckos will be 20 at the end of the summer. I've had him since he was a month old.

Aliza

 

[BrandyMontana]

I have lost a few animals due to crypto. My current animals are testing negative but I worry about stopping the spread for good since I know crypto is hard to detect consistently. Has anyone experienced a crypto outbreak and recovered from it? If so how long did it take before you stopped seeing it pop back up? I detected the first animal shortly after it came in about 1 year ago. I lost one animal that fall and put down another one at the same time that was right next to it and tested positive. It's been about 6 months since I've found a positive animal but I am still dreadfully worried.

I have lost a few animals due to crypto. My current animals are testing negative but I worry about stopping the spread for good since I know crypto is hard to detect consistently. Has anyone experienced a crypto outbreak and recovered from it? If so how long did it take before you stopped seeing it pop back up? I detected the first animal shortly after it came in about 1 year ago. I lost one animal that fall and put down another one at the same time that was right next to it and tested positive. It's been about 6 months since I've found a positive animal but I am still dreadfully worried.

I know it’s horrible. I just had put down on of my Geckos for the same reason. I will miss him very much,He was just plain goofy. Now I am down to one female. I am planning on getting a few more. But not until I know it’s safe. I am sorry for your loss.

 

[geckomantherealest]

Unfortunately figuring out when it's safe can prove rather cumbersome. All my current animals have tested negative at least twice and some four times now. My current plan is to just keep retesting everyone every 90 days. The positive animals are all gone and they will be missed but I feel there was just no way to safely keep them without spreading things further. You can find a talk by Jen Archer where she talks about why she suspects small flies may be one of the main ways that it spreads. Basically a fly buzzes around one enclosure and picks up the spores and then goes and lands in a water dish or something in the next cage. So even though I am using gloves, washing my hands often, and wash my clothing as soon as I leave that area, the flies could still be spreading it if I have even one infected animal left. For anything humid, like moist hides, I began adding a product that kills fly larvae, Gnatrol.

You think about all these big breeding centers, import centers, etc. and unless they are high heat steam cleaning their cages for an extended period of time or using 6%+ peroxide with a long contact time for every mm of their caging, and you can be sure they have a lot of animals being exposed to crypto coming and going through their doors. Now to make matters worse, crypto doesn't always result in cryptosporidiosis. One of my positive animals had zero symptoms. In contacting other people, the most common symptom of a positive animal actually seems to be no symptoms at all. So people think if they quarantine for 90 days, they'd know if an animal had crypto. The odds are they would not because the most common symptom is asymptomatic for weeks, months, or potentially years.

 

[BrandyMontana]

The male I just lost was over 15 years old. All that time, no sign of anything. I had no idea what it was until I read a post here.
I have made up a new enclosure for my one remaining gecko. Now, I was told that heating up all the hides, decor etc to 160 degrees will kill off any contamination. Have you heard about this method?

 

[geckomantherealest]

Did you have a necropsy done? The only real ways to diagnose crypto are necropsy, biopsy, stomach swab, gastric wash, or fecal. It can't really be diagnosed by symptoms since all the same symptoms could be caused by a variety of other things. C. sepentis in particular might not produce symptoms in lizards but they can still carry it. For the remaining gecko you could ask your vet to do a series of acid fast stains or you could go to vetdna.com and select the test for 25$ called crypto panel. I would do about 5-7 tests with each test 1-2 weeks apart since the animals may intermittenly shed the parasite. Note the form lists "Lizard" and "Snake" crypto which you can ignore since both lizards and snakes can carry both species. If you have not received a positive test or it was found during necropsy, then I have good news that it may not be crypto at all since it is impossible to diagnose from symptoms alone.

 

[BrandyMontana]

My entire colony got crypto 9 years ago. I had most of them tested and they were all positive. Because of that I had to stop breeding geckos and with a few exceptions stopped increasing my collection. During the first year I lost about half of my geckos, which included over 30 who had hatched in my home: I don't mean that I lost 30 hatchlings, but that I had an unusually large number of geckos due to all the hatchlings, which I now couldn't ethically sell. Since then, I've lost a few geckos every year to crypto. I haven't had any deaths in over a year, but they're all still positive even if they test negative sometimes because they're not shedding parasite. Crypto is not going to die out; it's there to stay. With a group of crypto geckos you have 2 choices: have all your geckos put down, completely clean every enclosure with an ammonia solution and let them air dry, throw away all your gecko furniture and get new stuff and then start again. The other choice is to stop adding to the collection and enjoy the geckos that aren't showing symptoms for as long as they're healthy. At the moment I have 26 geckos and 1 bearded dragon. Except for the bearded dragon, who's almost 6, and an electric blue day gecko who's about 2, the rest of the geckos range in age from 9 to nearly 20 --Spencer, one of my crested geckos will be 20 at the end of the summer. I've had him since he was a month old.

Aliza

Did you have a necropsy done? The only real ways to diagnose crypto are necropsy, biopsy, stomach swab, gastric wash, or fecal. It can't really be diagnosed by symptoms since all the same symptoms could be caused by a variety of other things. C. sepentis in particular might not produce symptoms in lizards but they can still carry it. For the remaining gecko you could ask your vet to do a series of acid fast stains or you could go to vetdna.com and select the test for 25$ called crypto panel. I would do about 5-7 tests with each test 1-2 weeks apart since the animals may intermittenly shed the parasite. Note the form lists "Lizard" and "Snake" crypto which you can ignore since both lizards and snakes can carry both species. If you have not received a positive test or it was found during necropsy, then I have good news that it may not be crypto at all since it is impossible to diagnose from symptoms alone.

I did, the vet said, he was very sick and it could have been Crypto or a lot of other things! But she did say he had a lot of signs of old age. Thinning bones, losing his color and worse he had gone blind. He would have probably starved to death. Since he only ate live insects. She agreed it would be best, just to let him go. It broke my heart. He had such a crazy personality.
I am going to make an appt to have my female tested and I will also check out the site you mentioned.
I want to thank you for sharing so much information with me. I have learned so much.

 

[akhtar]

Very unfortunate