Lazy Surdam (top) Oct 2nd 2003

            Olivia and Sophie Gaines (bottom) Oct 6th

Unconventional treatment aids dogs sickened by red tide

By ERIC ERNST eric.ernst@heraldtribune.com

As red tide settled in Placida Sound, just east of Little Gasparilla Island, the algal bloom appeared to be a typical onslaught of the Florida red tide organism, Karenia brevis.
Dead fish washed ashore. Island residents stayed indoors or donned surgical masks to filter the toxins the red tide would release into the air.
But this time something else happened: The dogs got very sick.
Soon, this particular red tide event took on an historic significance that the scientific community is still trying to sort out.
Scientists at the Florida Marine Research Institute in St. Petersburg have confirmed the presence of red tide toxins in the bloodstream of at least one dog from Little Gasparilla. They believe it may be the first known intoxication documented outside a laboratory.

And an unconventional treatment, which seems to work, has also broken new ground in veterinary circles.

It all started in mid-April when Buddy and Laurie Gaines' dog, Olivia, spent a day on the Little Gasparilla Island beach near their home. She ran around, swam in the waves and ate dead fish on shore.
That evening, the year-old vizsla, a medium-sized hunting dog, became disoriented and began to stumble as if she were drunk. When her condition worsened, the couple rushed her to the Veterinary Emergency Clinic in Port Charlotte.
By the time they got there, she was paralyzed, blind and suffering seizures.
Laurie Gaines says she suspected red tide as the culprit, but the veterinarian, Amanda Schell, said she had never heard of an algal bloom having that effect.
Schell administered a traditional treatment -- fluids and antibiotics.
The dog recovered, went home, relapsed, returned to the vet, and eventually was rushed to Florida Veterinary Specialists in Tampa, where she spent 10 days undergoing tests for everything from West Nile virus to heavy metal contamination.
Meanwhile, other dogs with the same symptoms were coming to the Port Charlotte emergency clinic, and to other veterinarians, from Little Gasparilla.

Gene and Lisa Surdam brought in three dogs. "They were going blind. They were throwing up. They were whining and thrashing. It was absolutely heartbreaking to watch," Lisa Surdam says.

The vets finally concluded red tide could have triggered the symptoms, but they could find no documented cases or literature about how to treat red tide poisoning in dogs.
A urine sample, collected April 16 by the marine research institute, confirmed Olivia had considerable concentrations of brevetoxins in her body.
Still, no one knew what to do about it.

A new method

Help came from an unexpected quarter when Roger Botelson of the Englewood Animal Hospital, who also treated four dogs, conferred with Louie Pierson of Amber Lake Wildlife Refuge.
Pierson is an old hand at treating seabirds, such as cormorants, suffering from red tide effects. He has found that letting the birds dehydrate for 24 hours or so increases their survival rate dramatically. Botelson tried the method on one of the Surdams' dogs. He administered diuretics, monitored the kidneys and said the treatment worked.
Schell followed suit in the emergency clinic and reported success with 10 dogs.
"It goes against everything we learn as doctors in medical school, but it works," she says.
The problems lingered only for Olivia, the first to show signs of the poisoning and the lone dog under Schell's care that did not receive the diuretic treatment. Two weeks after her first sample, the concentration of toxin in Olivia's urine was three times greater. The Gaines family, in Maine at the time, took their dog to Tufts University Medical Center near Boston.
"They had never heard of brevetoxin," Laurie Gaines says. Olivia stayed for 21 days.
She has since returned to normal. But her veterinary bills have totaled about $18,000, Gaines says.

While the vets searched for sources of treatment, scientists at the Florida Marine Research Institute collected reports, even anecdotal ones, about current and historic incidents of red tide debilitating dogs.
"This was definitely something different," says Jan Landsberg, who specializes in red tide's effect on animals. "We were intrigued by the whole thing."

Piecing together the past

Karen Steidinger, for whom the red tide genus is named and who has worked at the research institute for about 40 years, could recall no similar event, Landsberg says.
Landsberg called colleagues around the Gulf Coast, and the best she could elicit were reports, from the 1990s in Texas, suggesting pets "might be susceptible to red tide poisonings."
That's it, other than the report of a 1979 experiment in New York in which anesthetized dogs, injected with K. brevis cultures, experienced slowed heart rate, blood pressure fluctuation and stoppage of breathing.
A paucity of historical record doesn't signal that a new strain of algae has camped out along the Southwest Florida coast, Landsberg says.

Circumstances may have been just right to produce the Little Gasparilla event. Concentrations of the red tide cells surrounded the island. There was little breeze for several days. Residents let their dogs run loose on the beach. Some of the dogs ate fish and ingested water.
Landsberg says it would take laboratory tests and elimination of other variables to prove, scientifically, that red tide caused the distress the Little Gasparilla Island dogs experienced.

However, the circumstantial evidence certainly points to that conclusion.
As an institute document noted, "The current cases originating on Little Gasparilla Island, along with the improved methods of toxins analyses that are now available, suggest that dogs are sensitive to brevetoxin exposure.
"Most certainly, the recommendations must now include the caution to prevent dogs (and probably other pets) from consuming red-tide associated substances," the document stated.

Landsberg says the marine research institute has continued to collect urine samples from affected dogs. Schell has collected five. They will be forwarded to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to analyze the toxins in them, Landsberg says.
If nothing else, the exercise has turned on a light for area veterinarians.
"During the past 10 years, we've had a lot of similar toxicity cases from Boca Grande and Englewood," says Greg Fluharty, a vet with The Animal Clinic in Port Charlotte. "We couldn't nail it down. We thought it was food poisoning, when in fact it was probably this toxin."
As for the unconventional treatment, veterinarian Botelson says, "That's the way a lot of science works -- trial and error. Then the university guys figure out why it works."