This is the Vets Page

Are you a Vet, Animal Nurse or Vet Student, if you are then this page is for you. I figure that quite a few of you take a look at different sites and think 'Oh no I do not like that!'

If you work in a Veterinary Practice you will regularly find yourself at the emotional edge of the lives of many different people. We are there at the happy times when owners first have their pets, we guide them through out their lives and we are there on the end of a phone whenever there is a crisis. It is not surprising that sometimes it is difficult to break this bond when the end is approaching especially if we are deeply involved in the decision as to how and when it is to happen. It is often the small things that we do that mean so much. Keep doing these small things they are appreciated.

Here in Minsterley we are lucky that we are only 100 yards from a Post Office. We miss Sunday collections and sometimes make use of a post box in a business park in Shrewsbury where the late post is collected at 7 pm. For some years we have used a franking machine for convenience and to make our post look more professional. I wasn't expecting it to be a cheaper option. It is quicker when sending out booster reminders and large animal accounts, but you would need to send out thousands of items a month to make it cheaper than stamps to cover the rental of the machine and the cost of consumables, franking machine ink is one of the most expensive fluids known to man. Also it costs £50 each time to postal rates go up to update the machine. If you happen to calculate the wrong postage there is a fine of 80 pence each time and after a while the machine struggles to print a clear post mark and has to do a maintenance programme each time it is switched on wasting more of that expensive ink.

For the past six months we have used Smart Stamps. These are much better as the computer printer does all of the work. It takes some planning as it is better to print the envelopes before you put anything in them, it is quick though and it will do labels as well. It is easy to print both envelopes and labels, it will print from an address book which is much quicker for regular post. We have discovered that it is happier with slightly heavier window envelops, but that problem was easily rectified. With Smart Stamps you can print both your Surgery address and a logo or slogan to ' advertise ' on the envelopes. It is easy to download the postage and you can set it up to do it automatically each month when you get used to how much postage you are using. Also post with Smart Stamps seems to get there the next day even if it is sent second class, and there is no system of fines if somebody in the sorting office decided a package is 5 gms over weight or 5mm too wide. Try Smart Stamps for a month and you will never buy stamps again.

I have never quite understood why there is such a concern about MRSA. Perhaps it's to do with mixed practice where we sometimes see challenging infected wounds in farm animals. I can not really see the point in taking swabs from door handles and computer key boards, let alone people who work here. There must be the assumption that MRSA is carried by a proportion of the human population and sometimes on our patients so it will come in through the door from time to time. We do certainly wash our hands a lot, but not between every patient that comes into the consulting room. Remember for most patients in the consulting room hands touch the coat and not the skin of the animals so there is a reduced chance of transferring organisms from patient to vet or from vet to patient. The trick is to do the clean ops first and to always follow a rigorous regime to prepare the site. The last thing we always do is to spray with surgical spirit and I am sure that is the reason MRSA does not trouble us.

It is a bit unfortunate that the H1N1 Influenza outbreak has been called Swine Flu as in reality it is more of a problem to people than pigs. I can see it causing all sorts of problems in Veterinary Practice as we are mainly small businesses who have direct contact with lots of different people and it is not likely that we will be able to organise vaccinations for vets and nursing staff before the infection comes. It is particularly difficult when TB Tests have been started on farms as there might not be anybody well enough the read the results and a two month  delay could cause all sorts of complications. Lets hope it will not be as bad as predicted.

If you do not work in either Mixed or Large Animal Practice you are missing out on one thing at least. You will not be getting many cups of tea when you go out on visits. If you are lucky enough to get one offered the chances are it will be made with real milk and farm water. More and more farms have their own water supply now and it is surprising just how different the tea tastes even if you have not had to work hard to get it. Vets on visits should never refuse the offer of a cup of tea, farm tea is something that money just cannot buy.

You have got this far so you must like to find out things from your computer. Is your office full of faxed lab reports filed in some sort of order? Doesn't it take ages to find the ones that you did a year or so back, somehow the more you want to find something the longer it takes to find it. Recently I have started to have lab reports e mailed as well as faxed. This is brilliant, two mouse clicks and they are filed on a floppy disc so the fax copy can go in the bin. Most of the results should find their way onto our animal screens, but having an e mail copy on a disc means that they are easy to find if you need to and easy to edit and print if a client or another practice should need to see them.

Just lately clients have been wondering what on earth is going on as the familiar posters in our waiting rooms have either disappeared or now have any drug names blanked out. The surgery clock has also been modified to disguise the name of the injection that gives around the clock pain relief. So far I have not taken drug company representatives into closed rooms just in case a stray nurse hears the name of a POM-V product that they are promoting, but it could come to that. I think most people rather liked those adverts for a certain dog wormer on the back of their bus and the wormer posters in the market. They cheer the place up and act as a reminder that they should be doing something. Clients did not necessarily come in and ask for a specific wormer, but they were more aware of the need to do it.

For more than a year not one person commented on my prominently displayed notice in the waiting room listing the price of the ten most commonly dispensed POM-V products at either of our surgeries or asked what the drugs might be used for. I guess it might have been better to get us all to display the price of ten specific products with the addition of VAT so that there is at least some meaning to it. This year when I revised the list I also translated it into Dutch. Since then there has been some interest, several people have identified the language and asked what it was all about so at least it has finally been noticed. I do not think that there are many people who go from practice to practice to compare prices. If they did I do not think they would find sufficient variation to justify the effort. If the Department of Trade and Industry really wanted to sort out drug prices they should do something about the licensing system in this country and find out why the companies continue to increase their prices way ahead of inflation. Why is it that Doctors are encouraged to prescribe generic drugs when it is illegal for us to do so if a licensed product is available.

At least all of the batch numbers of POM-V products are in the computer system. They seem to range from the simple 047 to the complicated A09304Bl. I have some drugs here that seem to have two batch numbers, just to be on the safe side I suppose. Why does it have to be so complicated? Could we not start at 1 with no letters or dashes and why does each product need to have a different batch number I know it is Frontline Spot on Small Dog so why cannot it have the same numbers on the back as Frontline Spot on Medium Dog it is the same product different volume.

Over the years better drugs have been developed to treat the common disease that we encounter on farms. There are many more vaccines and on some farms the housing and ventilation has improved as young stock may find themselves in buildings that have been designed for a specific purpose. In the past it was quite common for veterinary visits to farms to treat large groups of calves with pneumonia. We would take lots of temperatures and inject the worst ones each day with intravenous antibiotics and other drugs to stop the fluid building up on their lungs. Times have changed better drugs have been developed that are easier to give and now we do not get to see so many clinical cases as there are treated by the farmers themselves. This may not be the best situation, but many of our clients are good at spotting the early signs of disease and well able to judge the treatment required. It is going to cause all sorts of problems now that micotil has been restricted to a vet only injection. Most of our clients have been using it for years and are well aware of the potential dangers involved. It has I am sure saved many animals and it is going to be difficult for us to explain that they are not to have it. Also if it is supposed to be so dangerous why are us vets still allowed to use it?

Farms cannot go on getting more and more cows in an effort to just keep going. If one man can milk 280 cows on his own now it doesn't mean that he will be able to cope with 350 in six months time, more than likely he will just get on with it but is it any wonder it is so difficult to get staff to work on dairy farms now. At the moment there are two kinds of dairy farm, those that are getting bigger year on year and those that are just free wheeling until the owner retires. It cannot be right to keep more and more cows, the actual farm does not get any larger so the herd has to walk further and further for pasture and the farm has to get grass and maize from further and further away. Diesel is a considerable farm cost that is not always taken into consideration when farmers work out the cost of feeding their stock. There are lots of things to take into consideration as herd size increases. It is difficult for individuals to establish themselves in a social group when they have so many others to interact with.

No body is very happy about the new arrangements for pre movement testing of cattle over 42 days of age. Farmers seems to think that the only people to benefit from it are us vets. Many calves that go through markets here are over six weeks in age so there will be many visits to farms to test a small number of animals. In reality it is proving difficult to price the testing at a sensible rate so we are doing it below cost. Since it has started I seem to have used up box full of paper and I am sure that my carbon foot print has got larger as I race around the countryside testing small groups of animals. There is a great deal of confusion about the documentation required. If we test 20 animals before they are sold they could end up on twenty different farms. The TB 52 and TB 52A forms were not really designed to be given out to farmers. I would not be happy about sending out photocopies of the test results. Any body with a bottle of Tipp-ex and a scanner can readily create their own list of tested cattle. It would have been far better if we could have signed and dated the passports, but second best are individual certificates. Fortunately the new Taurus software can readily generate these but it still takes time to sign and stamp each one.

There are some strange things that we have to put up with. One of the worst is when a Web Site is advertised before it is actually constructed. Off you go on the search engines only to find that what you are looking for does not exist yet. This is a waste of time, the chances are that when it is up and running you would have long forgotten about it and gone off to something else. 

Drugs are like that though aren't they? New things are advertised in all of the Veterinary Magazines for weeks before they appear on the update disk from the wholesalers. By the time the new disk does come out so that we can work out how much it is and put the product onto our computer's drugs file I have forgotten all about it. Come on guys, the way we do things has changed, you need to tell the wholesalers about things first before you take out those expensive adverts.

Products that are good will sell themselves. It is only the not so good ones that we constantly need to be reminded about. Think of the three most useful drugs that you have used today. You use them because they are easy to give and they work. The drugs we use most of are not the ones that fund those adverts. Also why have the reps been so slow to use the Internet?

I must say there are some reps that I like to see but too many of them have sold me things that I do not really want, sorry I am just not interested in those buy so many of this thing and get more free as we do not keep large stocks of anything. Our Drug store is at NVS waiting to be delivered tomorrow. I can still remember the days when reps with a new product would give you some to try, that seems a long time ago now.

Do you still get dogs in with parvovirus? We still see them from time to time and sometimes if the owners are willing get the opportunity to treat them. Whatever you give them it is the drip that keeps them going and it is often not until the fourth day that they will be able to keep any food down. We have got a fair amount of room, but still have great difficulty isolating parvovirus cases from the rest of our patients. There are real difficulties when puppies still appear to be vaccinated or if there are other dogs on the premises that have an uncertain vaccination history. Every time I treat a dog with parvovirus I resolve not to get into this situation again and make sure all of our patients are fully vaccinated, but somehow it still happens.

It is only natural that we have a fear of the unknown and for most of us who have only ever worked in the UK Rabies is an unknown disease and something we should all be concerned about. The Pet Travel Scheme is popular with clients and breeders and from humble beginnings has grown rapidly to include many more countries and travel routes. I still have my reservations about the scheme as not all of our patients enjoy traveling and apart from the dangers of new diseases being brought back from hotter countries we have to face up to the risk from Rabies itself. I understand that in 2003 there were 231 cases of Rabies reported in cats and 117 cases reported in dogs in the United States. It might well be that especially in the case of cats further animals died without a veterinary investigation. Incidentally 83 rabid horses were also included in the statistics for that year. I realize that the United States is a big country and so far only a limited number of cats and dogs come to us under the Pet Travel Scheme but it is still a worrying situation. As things stand it might not be long before we see our first case of this terrible disease here. Will we be ready to cope with it when it comes?

Also of concern is the speed of the spread of Tuberculosis in cattle. I came to this part of Shropshire in the mid seventies when all of the herds were clear of the disease and just occasionally did we find individual reactors from animals that had been brought into the area or in one case where a cowman was thought to have infected his cows. Tuberculosis was thought of as a serious disease at that time so neighbouring farms and in contact animals were traced and tested as a matter of priority.  Now the dairy farmers have discovered the benefits of maize and infected herds are cropping up all over the place.  

In the past it was rare to get a bovine swelling of any size, now they are seen on many herd tests here. These are not usually enough to cause an animal to be a reactor or an inconclusive reactor, but I just wonder what the readings will be at the next test. Not so long ago I noticed that one of the cows that I was testing had swollen sub mandibular lymph glands and was not looking so well as the other animals that she was with. She had a massive bovine reaction, beyond the reach of the calipers which is quite alarming for a three year old cow that was reared on the farm. I never thought that I would ever see a clinical case of Tuberculosis in a cow and it is very sad that it has come to this. Fortunately they were able to discard her milk as soon as the diagnosis had been made and DEFRA were able to deal with her quickly once they had the results from the whole herd. It is alarming that this disease can develop so rapidly in some individuals.

Sooner or later we have got to face reality and come to terms with the fact that we are never going to get anywhere with this disease until we can solve the badger problem. We are chasing Tuberculosis in the wrong species M bovis can get establish more readily in badgers than cattle it is the badger that seems to be the primary host for this disease. We are all part of this vast DEFRA machine which has grown and grown over the years to test and trace more and more cows with less and less effect. What are we doing developing blood tests and perhaps vaccines for cattle when we should be concentrating all of our efforts on detecting and eliminating Tuberculosis from badgers. This is no trivial disease. DEFRA is supposed to act in the interests of wildlife as well as farmed animals. It is difficult to understand why some wildlife species are given a God like status while others are controlled at every opportunity. In some ways it is shame that badgers dying of tuberculosis do it quietly underground. Why do we never see any research done on this? Are there no computer models for the spread of Tuberculosis in the badger population in the UK. Does anybody know how many badgers there are in the UK?

Nobody wants to be cruel to badgers, they are wonderful creatures that are fascinating to watch and treat as they usually make good patients if they have had an argument with either a car or another badger. The problem here in Shropshire now is that there are so many of them, one client reported counting forty on a field by her house recently, another had thirteen emerge from a farm building the other morning. It has been reported that the places where tuberculosis is active in cattle also have the highest concentrations of badgers recorded anywhere in the world. There must surely be a relationship between the density of badgers in an area and there tendency to develop tuberculosis. We are reluctant to treat casualty badgers now as we are not confident that we can do so without putting our own health at risk. Sadly many badgers with minor injuries will have to be put down.

We are not acting in the badger's interest by maintaining such a high population of diseased animals. If every cattle herd in the country were to be tested for Tuberculosis in the next two years and we were to use the information to find and clear the infected badger sets we could be free of this disease by 2010. Then we could get back to Routine Herd Tests every four years and have a smaller but healthier population of badgers. If we continue as we are we will struggle to stop Bovine Tuberculosis becoming a serious health problem in the human population and we might never be able to control it in cattle.

Tuberculin Testing does not get any easier as the years go by. There was a time when only cows  were tested so most dairy cows were dealt with in their stalls tied by the neck. Things were different then the stock were handled more although they did not appreciate the injections every four years. At least we could get to their necks. Now most farms have a crush. Newer crushes are wonderful things, they have all sorts of attachments for treating feet and doors that open or slide so that there is excellent access for clipping and worming. The problem is that none of them have been designed with a view to doing anything in the middle part of the neck. You just cannot get there. Once you put a young frightened continental animal in the thing it is a bit like trying to retrieve a dropped screw driver from the moving parts of a running engine. This is a dangerous job.

Two years ago we started to do Tuberculin Tests in a different way and I have been very pleased as to how well it works. The amount of time saved in the office is considerable and the reports that we send in are printed and legible. Have you come across the Taurus 500 hand held computer that you down load with the farm cattle details from the British Cattle Movement Service? It does most of the work for you. This sounds complicated but once you have done it two or three times you will wonder why you have had to write down all of those ear numbers and ask for all of those ages when testing. There is time now to talk about more interesting things on the farm. If you send a friendly e mail to the British Cattle Movements Service they will send you a pass word and a pass code so that you can download cattle details for the farm that you are going to. It is quite straight forwards to save this as a text file. When you open the file from the Taurus Software all of the Cattle details appear on the TB52A form. It takes a matter of seconds to transfer this information into the hand held computer that you take onto the farm. During the test the unit searches for the last two digits of the ear number. When you have found the correct animal it is just a question of pressing save to confirm the breed sex and age of the animal. The unit has electronic calipers attached the automatically measure the injection sites in millimeters. All you need to do next is save the details, inject the tuberculin and go onto the next animal.

On the second visit again you have to search for the animal and the machine is immediately ready to measure the results. It then interprets the readings and you just need to press the save button before the next animal comes into the crush. Back in the office the results are transferred back into a computer screen for editing. Animals with no change in their readings can be edited automatically, animals not tested can be deleted automatically. On some farms where the data from the BCMS is poor you may need to edit some ages and put in some breeds, but this does not usually take very long. There is a minimal amount of work to fill in the farm details before the TB52 and TB52A forms are printed. We normally do double sided printing. The system has been set up to deal with blood tests either at the same time or separately and will accept calving dates and remember the tube numbers as you go along. The unit seems to be quit robust, we have used it on very wet tests and on very cold days with no real problems. There is more about this on the Vetronic Services web site.

As well as the Taurus System we have started to use VeBus. This is slowly evolving and works well for small tests. Essentially the VeBus website is used to download details of cattle on the farm and these are printed out and measurements recorded by hand as the test is done. When the results are ready all of the information has to be transferred back onto the web page. You have to stay on line all of the time to do this. On a big test there is a huge amount of paper to search through on the farm. It is impossible to work this way if the crush is outside and you have chosen a wet and windy day. After a while it becomes difficult to spot the numbers, they are there on the sheets but you just cannot see them. A big advantage of the system is that the tests due are displayed on a computer screen and there should not be so many problems with practices not being informed as to when tests are pending. The big disadvantage of the system is that it ties up a phone line all of the time when you are using it and it takes a long time to put in all of the results.

It can be very frustrating trying to rely on the VeBus system alone for testing cattle on farms. The problem is that it is not very reliable and is regularly off line for maintenance. For the past five days for instance it has not been possible to download any ear numbers from the CTS system and there was a long period when it was not possible to print the test results. This is more than annoying when there are so many tests to do and there does not seem to be any way around problems when they develop.

If you have tried different ways of testing cattle you will be aware of the short comings of the cattle movements system. We are regularly finding 5% of adult cattle are not registered. It is rare to do a whole herd test and find that all of the animals are accounted for. Many long dead cows go on getting older and older each year when they have long left the farm. The frustrating thing is that on most farms the animal records are better than the data that BCMS have. It is difficult to understand why after official testing a simple audit is not undertaken. Sometimes it is easy to spot the animals that have long gone as they do not fit into the age pattern on the farm. There are still far too many animals without tags or with tags that cannot be read accurately.

Things have changed in Farm Animal Practice and it is only occasionally now that we get to go out and dehorn cattle. It always surprises me that whenever I am asked to do any dehorning it is always a windy day so I have to find somewhere to shelter the dehorning iron and stop the flame blowing out. Somehow it is never a job for still days.

I suspect that you like us are still having problems with ear tags in cattle. No matter where they are brought from the tag shedding rate on some farms is alarming. Sometimes it is the sloping bars at the silage barrier or wire mesh over gates, but not many farmers will spend a lot of money on new housing to save a few ear tags. Occasionally we have been able to help when new buildings are planned, but it is not very often that this happens. Part of the problem is that the quality of tags from different manufacturers varies so much. We have seen nicely printed plastic tags that are blank within a year of use because the ink has come off. Some of the button tags have very small printing on them and the ink gradually diffuses into the plastic so the numbers become blurred and faint. One test we did recently on yearling cattle involved four different people each giving a guess at the writing on the button tag so that a consensus of the most likely number could be made. We had to keep checking that the guessed numbers had not been recorded before.

There are still problems with poor quality metal tags where the numbers are not stamped distinctly and disappear long before the cow comes to the end of her days. Also it must be admitted that many tags in use at the moment are not tamperproof and can readily be removed and used in other cattle. Recently a client found an eight year old cow had died suddenly in his cubicles. It was a dark building and her head was close to a wall, but I could readily read her metal ear tag when I took a blood sample to test for anthrax. I was quite surprised by this until I realised that the cow had been imported from the Netherlands and the tag was shiny and bright with deeply imprinted numbers. I have not seen any of our own tags like that.

Cattle are valuable animals and it is important that they are identified accurately. There is no fool proof method. We have dairy clients who use ear tags with an imbedded microchip for management purposes. These work well and it is a great shame that they cannot be recognised as official tags. All you need to do is wave a reader at them and check the number on the display when it bleeps. If we do have to continue with a manual system of reading one of the ears should have a quality metal tag that will still be legible well beyond the expected life of the animal. I will accept that the other ear should have a large flexible tag that is capable of being read from a distance, but let us not fool ourselves into thinking that these could ever be tamperproof and cannot be swapped between animals if somebody really wanted to. If the layout of the numbering is good than on most farms there will be no need to use a third management tag which can only add to the chances of the ear becoming damaged.

Have you taken blood samples for the National Scrapie Plan yet? We do have a small number of pedigree sheep breeders most of which have had varying numbers of their rams and ewes tested privately each year so that they have a fairly good idea of how they are doing as far as resistance to Scrapie is concerned. Most of them have never had sheep with Scrapie so they have no direct experience of the disease. I find that the flocks that are doing less well tend to be the ones that have only recently been established. Buyers have been most impressed by the pedigrees of their new sheep, but have not always asked enough questions about their genetics.

We are testing lambs and rams for the National Scrapie Plan. It seems complicated at first but we have not had any problems administering the electronic boluses so far. I always wet them first and they seem to be readily accepted as long as the sheep have not been stressed. It can be difficult to get enough blood sometimes as some of the tubes do not seem to have a very good vacuum in them. The paperwork is straight forwards and is all completed on the farm so there is little to do back in the office. It can be difficult working outside particularly if it is windy as the testing generates a lot of rubbish and the batch labels have a habit of flying away and do not make themselves available to stick on the forms and boxes.

I think we will need to keep checking that the boluses are still working, particularly for animals that are going to be sold. I have come across one ram so far who has lost his bolus so he will have to be retested at some stage.

There seems to be talk at the moment about getting somebody else to do your after hours calls. This has long been a bone of contention, how much easier life would be if we could just go home after evening surgery and start again the next day? You might be in an area where there are emergency out of hours clinics, but it never will be an option for most of us, we still treat farm animals here.

True most of the things we see when the doors are closed are not true emergencies, that is not the point. It is never easy no matter how carefully you question owners to find out exactly what is going on over the phone and occasionally something that seems fairly mundane will turn out to be serious. Our attitude is that if someone is worried enough to phone up about one of their animals they need to be seen. Often owners just need reassurance that things are not serious.

It would concern me that some other Practice is taking over a case without the full history, because something went amiss over a weekend. If you have to come down to the surgery to pass on a case history you might just as well see your own patient. I never mind seeing companion animals after hours, better to go to a warm surgery than a cold and wet farm. Some of our most interesting cases start after hours it is just not possible to organize accidents to happen when it is convenient for us. Take these away and you get left with only the more routine things. 

How do you get on with after hours calls? Will we ever solve this problem?

Farmers know about Wellies, they live in them and forget they are still wearing them when they come to your clean Surgery. For ages I used to wear those long ones with the steel toe caps, then they got difficult to get and more and more expensive. It's Noras and waterproof trousers now, nothing has trodden on my toes yet, and they are much easier to clean. Which are the best wellies? Go on tell me these things are important! We may not live in them in the same way that our farmers do, but we take them on and off more in a day than most people would in a month and we clean them more than anybody else ever does. Which are the best?

I have contributed a little bit to the debate on Veterinary Surveillance, it concerns me that at the present time we are doing very few post mortems on farm animals. This is partly to do with the over thirty months scheme and partly to do with the costs involved  if animals are sent to the local Veterinary Investigation Center. We are fortunate that we have a local Veterinary Investigation Center, but still it is difficult unless  you are dealing with a very serious outbreak of disease to persuade farmers that it is cost effective to have things fully investigated. Sometimes when everything seems favourable for a post mortem investigation, for example the death of an untreated calf with pneumonia, still we fail to come up with useful results that the client can benefit from after months when samples are still being cultured and analysed.

If you deal with farm animals in any number I am sure that you know more about the diseases in your area than the distorted view that gets reported by the Veterinary Laboratories Agency. The problem is that nobody is getting this information to look at the National Situation. I fear that the dangers from any emerging disease will go un recognized. I have been reporting to the National Animal Disease Information Service every two weeks and I am sure this does help. DEFRA has been looking into the NADIS scheme and they have been told that it is the best practitioner based surveillance scheme in the world. So they would do well to build on the expertise that has developed over the years and fund it properly.

It was not that long ago that the Veterinary Investigation Centres did not charge for their services and we were able to investigate problems that we encountered on the farms to a greater depth. The Internet should be a good way to make the profession aware of what is going on in different parts of the Country, but some how we are not using it very effectively yet.  

It is good that we warm our clients about the risks of contracting Toxoplasmosis from cats. There is a growing trend for cats to be kept indoors and use litter trays, but do we really know the risk of exposure to this parasite, what do we base our advise on? Surely it is time that formally or informally we report how many cases of zoonotic diseases we diagnose each year in companion animals and horses so that there would be some scientific basis for the advise we give to our clients. This has gained importance with the arrival of the Pets Travel Scheme some of the dogs we will see at our Surgeries tomorrow could well have been in Southern Europe a matter of days ago. You should be able to find the report on Veterinary Surveillance in England and Wales if you follow the link to the DEFRA Web Site. The report can be downloaded from the Consultation Replies Section.

As a partly Large Animal Practice we have to Batch Track all of the large animal drugs and our farmers have to record animal numbers and batch numbers in their medicines books. I'm am not too sure whether this is achieving a great deal but it has to be done. It is difficult to understand why we do not  have to do this for Small Animals as well. Should there be a problem with a drug it is just as likely to be one that we use on Small Animals so why should they be excluded from the regulations? 

Have you seen the VetBuzz site yet? It is a little bit difficult to find, new and lively if you register your e mail address with them they will send you a prompt when anything interesting is going on. Well worth a visit.

Do you write a Newsletter? How do you get on with it? You can see that I do and somehow can always find something to say. It always seems to be the Farmers with the smaller farms that take the most interest in them. Do you do one for your companion animal clients? We have from time to time, they have been a bit helpful as a letter to clients who have missed their Booster Reminders. I try to give information rather than adopt the hard sell format. It is probably better not to expect too much, sometimes it takes a long time to get the message across.

Do you want to swap some ideas? Sometimes the Newsletter gets done in a rush and it is difficult to think of items to fill it each month. If you want I could send you some of ours attached to an e mail. They are usually done in Word Format if you can cope with that. Write your bit, use a bit of the Malthouse one and change the headings and you might get home earlier in the evenings. Go on give it a go!

Also do you know any good links? Some times I move around on the Web and come across three or four interesting Sites that are useful to link to, other times I seem to find nothing, somehow the best ones are found by accident. I would be grateful to hear about any Sites you find useful, if you find them of interest so will others.

Web Sites that are designed by somebody else will somehow lack that personal touch and may not convey the sort of information and treatments that you would like to promote. True it becomes difficult to cover everything with the limited time available, but there should be some indication of what things are causing problems here and other conditions that owners do not need to worry so much about.

These pages were started six months or so before Practice Web Sites became popular. We have to pay a little bit to stay up here and I guess we will try to be a little bit different. If there is anything you would like us to include, or anything you think I should leave out why no send me a line or two. 

Not many people click on CliveNorrell@compuserve.com   from here so give it a try!

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