garlic for coccidiosis- and maybe E - C [protozoan parasites

I have been doing a little research on rabbit cocci -because I use onion and garlic tops to keep chickens from getting cocci on this farm where birds have been for 100 years, -- and have found some interesting studdies about using garlic in rabbits...
I have also found some "info on the web saying garlic is toxic to rabbits" My rabbits will eat some garlic and have not "looked sick" after eating it.

http://www.ajme.org/article/S2090-5068(11)00128-X/abstract
Alexandria Journal of Medicine
Volume 48, Issue 1 , Pages 59-66, March 2012
Efficacy of Allium sativum (garlic) against experimental cryptosporidiosis
Maha Reda Gaafaremail address
Parasitology Department, Faculty of Medicine, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt

Received 15 October 2011; accepted 24 December 2011. published online 19 January 2012.

Abstract Full Text PDF Images References
Abstract
Background
Due to increasing problems of inadequate and unreliable medical treatments for Cryptosporidium enteritis, alternative therapies are being sought.

Objective
The current study was designed to evaluate the prophylactic and therapeutic efficacy of Allium sativum (garlic) against Cryptosporidium infection in experimentally infected immunocompetent and immunosuppressed mice.

Methods
Forty eight male Swiss albino mice were divided equally into control and experimental groups. Each group was further subdivided into four equal subgroups; two immunosuppressed and two immunocompetent. Cryptosporidial oocysts were isolated from human stools, and were used to infect the mice. The experimental subgroups received garlic orally two days before infection or one day following infection, and continued daily till the end of the study. Two weeks following garlic administration, mice stools were examined for counting the cryptosporidial oocysts, then the animals were sacrificed; their small intestines were processed and were examined for detection of the pathological lesions and for counting of the parasites. Also, myeloperoxidase (MPO) activity was measured in jejunal sections.

Results
The results showed that the infected immunosuppressed subgroups of mice; showed a statistically significant increase in the number of cryptosporidial oocysts in stool and ileal sections, as well as an increase in the MPO activity when compared to the corresponding immunocompetent subgroups. Garlic successfully eradicated the Cryptosporidium oocysts from stool and intestinal sections of the infected immunocompetent subgroup of mice receiving garlic two days before the infection. Besides, the oocysts were significantly reduced in all other infected experimental subgroups in comparison to the corresponding infected control subgroups. The intestinal sections of all subgroups received garlic before or after the infection, revealed a more or less normal architecture. Reduction in the level of MPO activity was also detected in all experimental subgroups.

Conclusion
Our findings suggest that garlic is a convenient prophylactic and a promising therapeutic agent for cryptosporidial infection


J Egy
Efficacy of garlic extract on hepatic coccidiosis in infected rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus): histological and biochemical studies
Toulah FH1, Al-Rawi MM.
Author information
Abstract
The rabbits were divided into three groups, of 12 rabbits each. G1 was the (non-infected non-treated) as control, G2 was the (infected-non treated), and G3 was the (infected and treated) rabbits. Each rabbit in the infected groups were given (10(3)) sporuleted oocysts of Eimeria stiedae per rabbit after forty five days exactly. Faecal sample of rabbits from each group were examined each day post infection till oocysts appeared in faeces. The treatment was given by using suitable dosage of garlic according to body weight. After 15, 21, 28, & 35 days post-treatment faecal oocysts were output. Biochemical parameters as serum liver function (ALT, AST, GGT & ALP) that denoted the he-patic cells injury. The results showed a significant differences in the mean values of oocysts shedding and their mean number in bile ducts between Gs 2 &3 from the 15th day post infection (PI) (mean +/-SD:40.33 +/- 16.72 & 25.17 +/- .56 respectively) till the experimental end on the 35th day (55.75 +/- 19.79 & 0.94 +/- 1.43 respectively). The histopathological alterations were in liver of G2 at the experimental end. Coccidiosis in G2 induced histopathological alterations in liver tissue, marked cytoplasmic vacuolations in hepatocytes with clear signs of karyolysis, and dilatation of sinusoids with increase in Kupffer cells. Leukocytic infiltration around congested blood vessels was noticed. Efficacy of garlic on E. stiedae in infected Gs was resident. The liver of G3 regained almost normal appearance compared to control.

comments on feeding garlic to rabbits???

My undertanding is that while garlic is not "drop dead poisonous" for many animals, it can inhibit absorption of important nutrients and so cause problems over time.

I can't remember the details and do not have time now to look it up. Just throwing this out there in case someone else can supply the information.

Since you have both chickens and rabbits and are interested in natural controls for parasites etc., I am posting a link for you and for anyone else who may be interested. I've posted it before, but I don't know if you have seen it.
http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/pdf/ ... 9-7-21.pdf

EDITED TO ADD:
You will notice that some of the plants used are not considered safe forage for rabbits and may be quite toxic if given in quantity. Wild rabbits will self-medicate using plants they find - I once saw a cottontail eat half a large milkweed leaf - but they have instinctive knowledge of what they need. Domestic rabbits may have lost much of this instinct... Although I once had a doe that normally would not eat shepherd's purse snatch the stuff out of my hand and devour it when she had a touch of poopy-butt.

Everything from the onion/garlic family destroys red blood cells in at least mammals, don't know about birds, leading to hemolytic anemia. It's a slow process but the system will steadily be stressed more and more. Oxygen will not move around the body as well, the liver will slowly be damaged, and in young animals the shape and amount of bone and bone marrow will be altered because bone marrow makes the red blood cells. There will be more failure to thrive and sometimes heart issues. Since rabbits can't talk and their symptoms wouldn't be as obvious as humans poor production and early deaths may be blamed on all sorts of other things and go without explanation.

I wouldn't feed it full time but I think it could be a helpful occasional thing, many people feed garlic granules in the summer to help horses with bugs with no ill effects.

There's garlic in the organic pellets that we feed our rabbits. I would have to look it up, but in my research I found several references saying that garlic is beneficial to rabbits. I agree, though, that moderation is good - in all things.

Here's one, quickly, then back to work!
GARLIC – Immunize against disease, antiseptic, antibiotic, bloating and gas, wormer, respiratory expectorant. This stuff works it is just hard to get a rabbit to eat it!

Very low doses or occasional larger doses probably won't do anything but we really have no way to know. Unless you get blood work done there's no way to tell what point leads to problems. By the time you see symptoms the animal has been in distress for awhile. Personally I just don't find the potential benefits of onion family foods worth the potential risks. There are safer things to use if you want to skip chemical dewormers like DE and some say there is luck with pumpkin seeds as well as a few herbs. That's not to say we go out of our way to never feed such foods. We rarely throw anything away and my husband subscribes to the idea that you can never have too much garlic. I grow chives for soup and then give the dogs leftover broth. We don't purposely buy it for them though and potato peels are always thrown away.

akane ,-I agree with the husband--

-- Sat Apr 19, 2014 6:50 am --

since EC and Cocci are both protozoan parasites, -- Garlic/ onion tops, may work in preventing the spred of both-- it s wonderful for chicks here, and I almost never loose one if feeding chopped onion or garlic tops once a week, -and I have a rabbit in mind for the trial run for Garlic tops here. The Doe will have one or 2 young develope rear paralysis, if the litter box is not kept very clean--... so -- I will experiment... I have no idea if it is EC or not-- but-- it is a good guess.

04/17/2014 --started feeding a small handfull of Garlic Chives 1xday [SID ]

I never run out of Garlic chives, till Dec. -so --I will feed a small handfull each day until I have another litter, and see if anything changes--- the last 2 days she has been gobbling them up as soon as she gets them---[her litter is about 20 days old now]

Michael, please do us all a favour and document this process as you go so that there will be a full and coherent account of what you have done and the results. Garlic for rabbits has always been controversial and since you are doing these experiments, it would be valuable to have this documentation. Thanks!

The Doe has a tattoo #D01 She had 10 kits, I destroyed 2 at 16 days for rear paralysis, so she now has 8, and the nestbox has been removed. [some of the kits are eating a little of the Garlic Chives also.]
The feed is=2 parts rolled corn, oats, barley , 1 part BOSS [black oil sunflower seed] + free choice alfalfa/ orchard grass hay. and some garden weeds, [mostly dandelion, and plantain right now]
The Doe is in her second year with me, [she was a rescue, so i do not know her birthdate] She is or appears to be an American Blue.
She has had 5 litters,[for me] and lost 1 or 2 to rear paralysis every time but once . I will try to steal my son's camera and get a picture. <br /><br /> -- Sat Apr 19, 2014 3:53 pm -- <br /><br /> this is the doe==

michaels4gardens":3f2nlat1 said:

The Doe has a tattoo #D01 She had 10 kits, I destroyed 2 at 16 days for rear paralysis, so she now has 8, and the nestbox has been removed. [some of the kits are eating a little of the Garlic Chives also.]
The feed is=2 parts rolled corn, oats, barley , 1 part BOSS [black oil sunflower seed] + free choice alfalfa/ orchard grass hay. and some garden weeds, [mostly dandelion, and plantain right now]
The Doe is in her second year with me, [she was a rescue, so i do not know her birthdate] She is or appears to be an American Blue.
She has had 5 litters,[for me] and lost 1 or 2 to rear paralysis every time but once . I will try to steal my son's camera and get a picture.

-- Sat Apr 19, 2014 3:53 pm --

this is the doe==

Click to expand...

She doesn't look to have the right body type for an American...or it could be just the way she is posed here.

When I get a steady paycheck, I plan to have the Doe blood tested , to see if there is EC titer in her blood,
[I can get a discount where I work]. If there is a positive test, then this test will be of some value, -- If not-- it may remain a mystery.

EC titer? Sorry still new to this and do not recognize the acronym for EC.

Sagebrush, E.C. stands for E. Cuniculi, often called wry neck. When you consider that the full name of this illness is Encephalitazoon Cuniculi, it is not surprising it gets shortened. It is caused by a one celled protozoal parasite.

http://www.barbibrownsbunnies.com/ecuniculi.htm

I have also seen this disorder called head tilt, but since there are other things that can cause tilting of the head (such as an inner ear infection) it is best to use E.C. or E. Cuniculi for the protozoal infection.

Ok, glad I asked. Thankfully I have not had this hit my herd. Is it ok to give the buns garlic chives in this case?

MaggieJ":29zj9biy said:

Michael, please do us all a favour and document this process as you go so that there will be a full and coherent account of what you have done and the results. Garlic for rabbits has always been controversial and since you are doing these experiments, it would be valuable to have this documentation. Thanks!

Click to expand...

:yeahthat:

I'm looking forward to the outcome as well!

michaels4gardens":29zj9biy said:

I plan to have the Doe blood tested , to see if there is EC titer in her blood

Click to expand...

I had no idea that there was a titer test for it!

I had a couple cases of hindquarter paralysis last year, but found that one of them had the cysts of rabbit tapeworm in the abdominal cavitiy. Depending on where the tapeworm larva encysts itself, it can also cause paralysis.

The rabbits themselves become infected by eating plant matter that has the eggs on it. I suspect mine got it from weeds I was foraging, although it could have come from the hay as well.

The rabbit is only the intermediate host so won't have an adult tapeworm visible anywhere- those form in the animal that is unlucky enough to ingest the infected rabbit. The cysts would be easy to miss during butchering (or necropsy) if you didn't know what to look for, so here is a photo of the ones I found:

Sagebrush":3d2rqap3 said:

Ok, glad I asked. Thankfully I have not had this hit my herd. Is it ok to give the buns garlic chives in this case?

Click to expand...

Michaels4gardens is doing trials with garlic and garlic chives to combat certain diseases, and we are eagerly awaiting his conclusions. In the past, most people have avoided garlic for rabbits (and other pets like cats and dogs) because it is considered to be toxic. So the jury is still out on this one.

It sounds to me that the plant you call sagebrush shows promise as a medicinal for rabbits. It would be great if you could do a little research on it and post in the Natural Feeding forum.

I've never had E Cuniculi in my herd and rarely coccidiosis, in spite of keeping them in a colony and feeding greens cut from fields where there are cottontail rabbits, chickens and wild birds. I've always felt that the medicinal properties of many of the weeds and tree leaves that I feed have more than offset the risks. Fairly recently I found an article that would seem to bear this out. I posted the link earlier in this thread, but will post it again here for convenience.

http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/pdf/ ... 9-7-21.pdf

My apologies, Michael, for the thread drift.

I will deffinatly look into it and do my own trials to see if it is actually effective. I will start a new thread with that information when I have it all done.

MaggieJ":30unz57e said:

Sagebrush":30unz57e said:

Ok, glad I asked. Thankfully I have not had this hit my herd. Is it ok to give the buns garlic chives in this case?

Click to expand...

Michaels4gardens is doing trials with garlic and garlic chives to combat certain diseases, and we are eagerly awaiting his conclusions. In the past, most people have avoided garlic for rabbits (and other pets like cats and dogs) because it is considered to be toxic. So the jury is still out on this one.

It sounds to me that the plant you call sagebrush shows promise as a medicinal for rabbits. It would be great if you could do a little research on it and post in the Natural Feeding forum.

I've never had E Cuniculi in my herd and rarely coccidiosis, in spite of keeping them in a colony and feeding greens cut from fields where there are cottontail rabbits, chickens and wild birds. I've always felt that the medicinal properties of many of the weeds and tree leaves that I feed have more than offset the risks. Fairly recently I found an article that would seem to bear this out. I posted the link earlier in this thread, but will post it again here for convenience.

http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/pdf/ ... 9-7-21.pdf

My apologies, Michael, for the thread drift.

Click to expand...

I think it is very good to do our own studies on this kind of thing, as no one else will -- there will be no funding available from big Pharma...
EC , [and a few other things, ]is almost unheard of in wild rabbits, -- and around here wild rabbits eat sagebrush... makes me wonder...

michaels4gardens":ep1mto1m said:

When I get a steady paycheck, I plan to have the Doe blood tested , to see if there is EC titer in her blood,
[I can get a discount where I work]. If there is a positive test, then this test will be of some value, -- If not-- it may remain a mystery.

Click to expand...

fecal testing is the way to tell if it is cocci, as the parasite is passed from doe to kits via oral fecal route not through milk or blood exposure.

I have had the joyful experience of coccidiosis in my rabbitry; had to implement antibiotics (Albon) and a very time-consuming cage hygiene program to knock it down

Had necropsies and fecal testing to confirm the disease before treating it

The symptoms I saw were not hind end paralysis; it was bloating, mucoid enteritis, and teeth grinding of the weanlings and actually got bad enough where even some 3 to 4 week old kits started to get affected before weaning

The does where were the suspected carriers had muscle wasting across their backbone and tail and proportionately larger stomachs, no active enteropathy but a poor look to their condition in spite of getting BOSS and rolled oats added to their feed

I was losing up to 60% of litters at the peak of the epidemic

The symptoms of your kits seem more concurrent with e. cuniculi, which is much easier to treat than cocci. Fenbendazole (SafeGuard liquid goat wormer) is cheap and low-risk for overdose, it will be carried in the milk of the doe. The trouble with e. cuniculi is, like cocci, the encysted phase of its life can persist in the outside environment. It is passed by its carrier in urine, as it will invade the kidneys and live there, then shed oocyts in the nephrons of the kidney where urine is made.

In my preventative phase of treatment for cocci, hygiene has the largest role. The nest boxes are soaked overnight in a rubbermaid crate with a strong ammonia solution, then rinsed and allowed to dry in the sun, and not put back into use for at least a week or two after cleaning. Does' cages get cleaned at least every 3 months with elbow grease, torching, and ammonia. Weanlings are always moved away from mama into a sanitized cage. I still treat my weanlings prophylactically with Albon. Adding apple cider vinegar, willow twigs, and garlic are all feasable preventative strategies worth implementing if they add any bit of immunity to the awful disease it is worth trying.

I am now only seeing about a 10% loss of young rabbits to GI symptoms. I still have nightmares in my sleep of bloated, dying, and dead bunnies. I would like to see 0% occurrence and have these dreams quit haunting me.

I don't worry about Coccidiosis, it is easy to fix with Garlic or onion family, -- but-- the question is about EC...... and if allium sp will be effective for that also....