2003 - 72 (1)

This article describes a male Labrador with diabetes mellitus that had been treated with corticosteroids for several years because of atopy. The six-year-old dog was presented at the department of Small Animal Medicine and Clinical Biology with extreme muscular weakness. Electrofysiological examination revealed a peripheral polyneuropathy. It seemed very likely that the neuropathy was a consequence of the diabetes. A successful treatment of this diabetes neuropathy, a rare complication of diabetes mellitus in the dog, is described.

The general nutrient guidelines developed for companion birds are based on extrapolations of requirements determined for commercial poultry and game birds, the food habits of wild birds, and trial and error feeding experience. The maintenance energy requirements are derived from equations based on wild birds, without taking species-specific differences into account. The protein nutrition aspect is focused on the quantity rather than on the quality of the protein, as determined by the availability of protein and amino acids in different feed ingredients. Suggestions are given for determining the energy, protein and amino acid requirements of companion birds according to the Edinburgh model. Specific practical recommendations on bird diets, however, are not yet available.

Scrapie in sheep is the prototype of the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), of which BSE in cattle is the best known. Contrary to BSE in cattle, for which no genetic association with resistance has been found, sheep with a hereditary resistance to scrapie and BSE after experimental infection are known. Consequently, the selection of scrapie-resistant (ARR/ARR) sheep is currently one of the most important, if not the most important objective of the sheep breeding associations. The feasibility of obtaining a scrapie-resistant breed and the period in which it can be realised, mainly depend on the initial frequency of the ARR-allele of that specific breed. In this study, the PRNP-genotype and allele frequencies were sampled for the most important sheep breeds in Belgium. The genotyping of 854 animals revealed that 17.80 % of the tested animals are of the ARR/ARR-genotype and only 5 animals (0.59%) were of the most scrapie-sensitive genotype VRQ/VRQ. The frequency of the ARR-allele is 41.51%.