Rodenticide Chronicles ep. 2 - Navigating Neurotoxic Rodenticides
In the second episode of Rodenticide Chronicles, we're peeling back the layers of a topic that could save your pet's life—neurotoxic rodenticides. These hidden dangers can wreak havoc on your furry companions, and it's crucial to understand their effects. We'll decipher the science behind these toxins, discuss the urgency of prompt action, and guide you through the treatment options available. Plus, we'll share essential tips for prevention, so you can keep your pets out of harm's way. Don't miss this enlightening episode that puts your pets' well-being front and center.
What You’ll Learn:
The definition of neurotoxic rodenticides and their role in pest control
Understanding the neurotoxicity aspect and how it affects the nervous system
Insights into the history and development of bromethalin, a common neurotoxic rodenticide
The various forms and concentrations of neurotoxic rodenticides available in the market
Why veterinarians face challenges in diagnosing neurotoxic rodenticide exposure
The importance of pet owners providing crucial information about potential exposure
Immediate steps to take if you suspect your pet has ingested neurotoxic rodenticides
The significance of contacting poison control for professional guidance
Treatment options available, including making pets vomit and the role of activated charcoal
The potential long-term effects and recovery timeline for affected pets
Practical tips for safeguarding your pets and home from rodenticide exposure
Ideas Worth Sharing:
"If you think your pet has gotten into rodenticide, it is absolutely crucial that you get them to the veterinary emergency room as soon as possible. Immediate medical intervention can help save your pet's life." - Dr. Tyler Sugerman
"Decreasing the chances of them absorbing the toxin is better than trying to treat the symptoms." - Dr. Tyler Sugerman
Resources:
ASPCA Poison Control
https://www.aspca.org/pet-care/animal-poison-control
(888) 426-4435
Pet Poison Helpline
https://www.petpoisonhelpline.com/
(855) 764-7661
Watch On YouTube:
Read The Transcript:
Dr. Sugerman: [00:00:00] Hi, and welcome to Vetsplanation. I'm your veterinary host, Dr. Sugerman, and I'm going to teach you about veterinary medicine. In this podcast, we can dive deeper into the understanding of what our pets are going through and break down medical terms into easier to understand chunks of information. Just a quick disclaimer, this podcast is for informational purposes only.
This is not meant to be a diagnosis for your pet. If you have questions about diagnostics or treatment options, please talk to your veterinarian about those things. Remember, we are all practicing veterinary medicine and medicine is not an exact science. Your veterinarian may have different treatment options and different opinions.
The information I provide here is to help pet parents have a better understanding about their pets. If you like our podcast, please consider sharing this podcast with at least one friend or just somebody else who has pets as well. Now, let's jump into this week's episode.
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Vetsplanation where we discuss complexities [00:01:00] in veterinary medicine and relay them to you in a way that makes sense. So today we're going to dive into a topic that might be both fascinating and crucial to be aware of. That's called neurotoxic rodenticides.
I'm going off of, a couple weeks ago we did the coagulopathy rodenticides and now we're going on to the neurotoxic rodenticides and then next week we'll be going on to a different rodenticide. So let's like break down this term real quick here. So neuro means the nervous system.
We talk about neurotoxic rodenticides. Neuro means nervous system, which usually involves things like your brain, your spinal cord, and your nerves. Toxin is something that has to be ingested that is like poisonous. So rodenticides are toxins that are meant to kill rodents. Such as mice and rats. So therefore, neurotoxic rodenticides basically means it is a toxin that is meant to kill rodents by causing some problem with their nervous system. So the most [00:02:00] common neurotoxin rodenticide is called bromethalin. For anyone who's listened to the episode on Coagulopathy Rodenticides, you will know a little bit about this already.
Bromethalin was created in the 1970s when rodents started to become really resistant to warfarin, which is one of the coagulopathy rodenticides. Bromethalin was shown to kill about 90 percent of rodents, so people were really excited about this. They're like, yes, we want something that's gonna kill them really fast and a lot of them.
So it was starting to become available not just as blocks like warfarin was, but it became available as blocks, seeds, worms, pellets, and in a variety of different concentrations as well. This became really difficult for us because one of the first problems with this sort of toxin was that now as veterinarians, we have this more powerful rodenticide that comes in a variety of forms. We used to only have to worry about like green and [00:03:00] blue blocks, because those are usually what the warfarin came as, but when they vomited it up, we'd be like, Oh, it's a green block. Now we know that this was warfarin.
But now it came in things like worms and seeds and pellets. If we were to try to make them vomit, those worms and those seeds, and I don't mean like a real worm. I'm sorry. They're like these little stringy type things that look like worms, like gummy worm candy.
That's essentially what they look like. But those worms and those seeds, they break down in the stomach really fast. And so therefore, even if I make them vomit, 30 minutes later, an hour later, we may not see any evidence of that rodenticide because it's already digested in there. So we're not going to know if they actually got into it or not.
Cats are super sensitive to this rodenticide as well. They're more sensitive than dogs are. They have the same sensitivity as about a rodent does. Dogs are a little less sensitive to it, but still [00:04:00] doesn't take a lot to cause problems. So let's talk about how this neurotoxic rodenticide works.
There is a very complicated answer to this, but I'm not going to make it so complicated. I'm going to try to break this down into simpler terms, for those who have not taken molecular biology essentially. So the nervous system, it's basically comprised of your brain and your spinal cord.
The nervous system has lots of different types of systems, pumps, all these things that are, that are happening. But in each one of the cells, they have pumps that do all these different things to try to help make sure that your nerves are firing correctly.
One of the most important pumps is called the sodium potassium pump or the sodium potassium ATPase pump, but I just call it sodium potassium pump for short. These pumps, they bring sodium out of the cell, and they push potassium into the cell. This helps keep the nervous system functioning correctly, but it also keeps the water balanced in the [00:05:00] correct places as well.
I've talked about this like in the water toxicity episode, that water likes to follow sodium. So this neurotoxin, it works on the cells in the central nervous system, so the brain and the spinal cord, by stopping this sodium potassium pump from working correctly. That keeps sodium inside the cells of the central nervous system, which then makes water want to follow that sodium into the cell. Eventually, if we keep pushing water into the brain and spinal cord, it's going to swell and cause something that we call cerebral edema, which is brain swelling, or it causes spinal edema. So swelling of the spine. Think of this as like a pipe that might be like leaking into the ceiling.
Unfortunately, my wife knows about this, we had a pipe that leaked into the ceiling above, like where our washer and dryer was. And I didn't realize it at first. Like I just saw kind of like a tiny little bump, but I wasn't a [00:06:00] hundred percent sure what it was. And I went to bed. Cause I had stayed up that night by the next morning, it was like the whole.
The whole ceiling was swollen, the wall was swollen, and water was leaking through that. So that's what happens to that cell. That cell is like our ceiling. It's just like swelling and these big, big divots in it, or sorry, big swellings kind of at the bottom of it. So it makes all of those cells swell up with water and, in our wall, we eventually created like a rip or a hole but don't worry.
Luckily in the pet's brain, that doesn't happen. The brain doesn't like rip open or anything, but it does cause some pretty major problems that we can now see outside of the body once we can actually see those clinical signs starting to form. The symptoms that we might see at higher doses are gonna be that the pet might become very hyper, hyperactive.
They might have muscle tremors, they could have grand mal seizures, meaning that they'll [00:07:00] fall over, they'll start paddling. And they're like, drooling at the mouth, or they're like, their mouth is shaking. It's very dramatic, so people usually will know that that is a seizure. They can have very high fevers because of the way it acts on that sodium potassium channel.
They can become comatose and even have death. So it can cause these symptoms anywhere between 4 hours to 36 hours after ingesting that rodenticide. At slightly lower doses, they can become paralyzed, which can last for about one to five days. And for some reason, cats tend to get this paralytic type or paralytic phase the most over dogs.
So how do we diagnose this now? This is really hard. So there's no test that we can perform in the hospital setting that's going to tell us that your pet got into a neurotoxic rodenticide. There are tests that can be sent out, but usually they require like a tissue sample of the [00:08:00] liver, the kidney, the brain or fat, which we're not about to perform surgery on them when they're comatose or having seizures or paralyzed, so therefore, unfortunately, that test is really only useful on necropsies. So for anybody that listened to our episode with Dr. Watson that we just did. A necropsy is an animal autopsy, essentially. And there are labs that you can send those samples out in order to find the answer, they're just very few and far between.
Otherwise the neurotoxic rodenticides, they can look like a huge number of other toxins and diseases. Such as things like mushroom toxicity, blue green allergy exposure, medications like opioids that are used for pain control, spinal cord traumas, disc diseases, and head trauma, just to name a few of the things that it can potentially look like.
Unfortunately, the best way to know if your pet got into a neurotoxic rodenticide is for you to tell us. If it is a possibility that it could be on the property or in a bait box or [00:09:00] anything, and you're lucky enough to see them eat it, then we need to consider that a possibility and you need to tell us. I've talked about this kind of on the coagulopathy rodenticide one, but if you saw your pet eat any sort of rat bait or rodenticide bait, then the very best thing that you can do is actually bring the packaging to us. Unfortunately, there are many companies that make this type of rodenticide, the bromethalin, along with many other types.
And they all have the same packaging. So especially some companies like Tomcat, the box looks exactly the same. The only thing that's different is that the active ingredient listed on the packaging is different. So therefore if you like well, this is the picture of what it looked like, but it's not like the receipt of what you had, or it's not like the picture of like what you bought on Amazon or the actual box itself.
It could be any of the rodenticides. So we can't say for sure that this is going to be the bromethalin one. All we know is that it could have [00:10:00] gotten into any of the rodenticides. Which means that we have to treat them all very differently, all at the same time. So ideally, if you have a rodenticide that you're going to put out keep the box, so that way we know what kind of rodenticide it is, so we know how to treat it if we need to. Otherwise, like I said, also bringing the receipt can be helpful as well, because if it has a SKU number, then sometimes we can look it up that way. But ideally, the box.
So now how much of this neurotoxin is actually toxic? This is a really hard question to answer because it depends on like how concentrated that toxin was in that product.
So to give you a bit of an idea though. A 30 pound dog only needs about half an ounce to cause a problem. And an average block, one of those blocks that gets put out, weighs about half an ounce to an ounce. But some blocks weigh up to four ounces. So it may mean that you only need a tiny little sliver of that block to become a problem.[00:11:00]
And that's just the blocks. I, I can't even tell you with the things like the, the worms or the pellets, like they could, it depends on the concentration on all of them. And, again, like when I was talking about the blocks, they can be lots of different things. Those worms can be different types of toxins.
Those seeds can be different types of toxins. So really the box is what's going to be the most helpful because we can see like how much each of whatever it is weighs and also how concentrated it is and what type of toxin it is. Again, that packaging is so important.
So how do we treat them then? If the pet ingested the neurotoxic rodenticide and it's caught within the first four hours, then the first thing that we want to do is make them vomit. Which is also called inducing emesis.
Now, depending on the form in which it came in, we may or may not physically see anything in that vomit. If it's the block form, then we may see them vomit up pieces of that block. But if it's the worm form or the seed form, like I said, we likely will not see anything in [00:12:00] their vomit because it breaks down so quickly in their stomach.
We still want to get up as much of that chemical as possible though. I have mentioned on numerous episodes before but you can use hydrogen peroxide at home to try to induce vomiting. I do not recommend it though unless you're in an area where you cannot get to a vet hospital quickly and the pet is not showing clinical signs.
If they're showing clinical signs, you cannot give hydrogen peroxide. But, I've seen pets aspirate on hydrogen peroxide. I've seen people overdose it. I've seen it create ulcers. I really don't recommend that. I recommend bringing them into the vet hospital if you possibly can. The reason why is we give special medications that's either injected or like drops that go into the eye.
And that actually makes the pet vomit and it's safer than doing the hydrogen peroxide. Ideally, next we'll have you call the ASPCA Poison Control or Pet Poison Helpline, which we will link in the show notes. And [00:13:00] what you need to do is you talk to somebody who's not the toxicologist first.
It's usually somebody who's trained to get all the information from you. So you talk to them, you tell them about the type of rat bait. You tell them about if they're having any clinical signs, about a rough estimate of their weight. So if you can weigh them really quickly, that's also really great.
But what they do is they'll then give you a poison control number. And then they'll have you give that to us. Just a couple notes about poison control is they do charge a fee unlike human poison controls. They're not paid by the government to do this. This is their job is to, talk to people about different types of toxins.
So you do have to pay a fee. I think that the last time, if I remember, I think it was $95 for it, but they'll tell you when you come on, like how much it is for the fee. And then when you get that number that tells us what the case number is. Write it down, give it to us, and then we call Poison Control and we talk to the toxicologist.
So we talk to them about if they're [00:14:00] showing any clinical signs. We talk to them about the treatment options, how big of a dose is a toxic dose, what kind of diagnostics we need to do, should we hospitalize them, and then also they'll answer any follow up questions. Even though let's say I call them today, but in a week we have a question still, you can still call them and you don't have to pay that fee again. It's just a one time fee.
Also other things about poison control real quick, again, I've mentioned these before, but if you have pet insurance or if you have certain types of microchips in your pet, tell them because sometimes either the insurance company will cover it or some microchip places, it's covered inside of you buying in their microchip. Definitely let them know if you do have either of those. And then, sometimes people just can't afford to call poison control and come in to us to have them be seen. If that's the case, again, the box is going to be the most important because then sometimes we can try to figure out the doses based on that amount.
[00:15:00] It's not going to be probably as accurate as if poison control does it, but it's going to be something and will help us to be able to determine how bad this could potentially be. But it's always very helpful to, have them called first because then it's going to help us to try to know like how toxic this drug is and also to know what the best steps are for your pet.
Usually the next steps is I'm going to, as the veterinarian, go talk to you about all the potential things that can happen and then talking about hospitalization.
Hospitalization is usually recommended in these cases as they can go downhill really quickly. We want to do everything possible to try to prevent that. So I talked about in the coagulopathy rodenticide episode about how much I prefer that rodenticide over other rodenticides because if we catch it quick enough they can be sent home to monitor for signs with just some medication.
This one is not like that though unfortunately. There is no medication or no antidote that I can give to stop the [00:16:00] effects of this toxin before those things happen. So what we want to do is do everything we can to try to prevent those toxins from actually being absorbed and stop them from affecting the pet.
So what we want to do, like I said, is try to prevent that toxin from absorbing, try to get all that toxin out as much as possible. Therefore, we place them on IV fluids for a few reasons. So one reason is to dilute out any toxins possible that could be in the bloodstream. But the bigger reason is actually because we are going to want to give them activated charcoal.
I've mentioned this before in other episodes but just a real quick disclaimer activated charcoal is not the same as liquefying the charcoal from like your barbecue so please do not do that. We give activated charcoal to help bind some of that toxin that's in the stomach and the intestines to try to help push it through faster in hopes that it will that the body will not absorb as much of that toxin.
I've also had somebody call and say like they gave [00:17:00] charcoal and it didn't make them vomit. This charcoal does not make your dog vomit. That is not the purpose of it. We do not want them to vomit. So we give other medications to vomit and then charcoal should try to help decrease the absorption of that toxin.
Giving so much of that activated charcoal though can cause something called hypernatremia, which means that the sodium becomes high in the bloodstream. Really high sodium can then appear neurological. And we've already talked about how this neurotoxin makes them look neurological, right?
So it's really difficult because we don't always know, is this because of the sodium being really elevated? Or is this because of it actually being from the neurotoxin? The way that we try to figure that out is before we give each dose of charcoal, we want to draw their blood and we look at their sodium level.
We want to make sure that sodium level is normal before we start to give the next dose of charcoal. Otherwise, we might start [00:18:00] treating the pet as if this was all due to the neurotoxic rodenticide, when in reality, we just need to bring their sodium level down by giving them more IV fluids.
This is a really important reason why we cannot just send the pets home with charcoal. We do need to hospitalize them and put them on IV fluids because we need that sodium to be normal. And we need to know that it's normal before giving the next doses of charcoal.
So if the pet does really well for the first 36 hours after ingestion, then they will likely be able to return home. Some toxicologists even recommend only like 12 to 24 hours of monitoring in the hospital on IV fluids, just depending on like the dose that they had gotten into. And there are usually no long term effects that we have to worry about in these cases as long as they didn't show any clinical signs. I will warn you though that you will see black stool for the next couple of days because of all of that black activated charcoal that we gave.
Now that's the best scenario, right? No clinical signs, we got to it early, we knew what it was, and we were [00:19:00] able to prevent it before anything happened. That's not always the way that this goes though. We'd love for them to always go back to their pet parents, but that's not always the case. So let's say they come in and they're having seizures or they're comatose or they're paralyzed, then what do we do?
So this becomes really hard because again, we don't know what caused it unless you tell us that they ingested it. So then we have to go into this plan of just treating them for all the symptoms that are happening. If they're having seizures, we are giving them anti seizure medications to try to help control them.
We want to give them medications like mannitol to help bring down the swelling in their brain. And if we know that they got into the neurotoxin, maybe we'll pass a tube into their stomach and perform what's called a gastric lavage, meaning we're flushing their stomach with water and then having it come back out of that tube to try to get as much out of their system as possible.
Now that's only if we knew though, if we don't know then there's no reason to do [00:20:00] it because there's definitely going to be some risks to it. We'll likely perform things like blood work and radiographs or x rays because we want to rule out other diseases if we don't know if it was this particular toxin.
And then we have to give them time. The half life of this toxin is about six days. So that means that on day one, when they ingested it, they have all of it, that whole amount in their blood system. Their neurological system, their stomach, their intestines, their bloodstream, all of it's in there.
It takes six days for it to go down to about half of that. So half of it has been destroyed, half of it is still in their system. It takes another six days, so twelve days, for it to go down to about a quarter of it in their system. And three quarters of it being broken down and gone. Depending on how much they ate, it could be weeks before they're actually back to normal.
And unfortunately, some pets will have like permanent brain or neurological damage from it. We'll not know what kind of parts are affected or if it's going to affect their temperament [00:21:00] or what it's going to affect if they have permanent damage until weeks afterwards, unfortunately. And there's always a chance that they don't make it through this toxin as well.
Sometimes when we stop the medications thinking that they're improving, but the signs they come back and continue. That's not a great prognosis for them. And that's usually because we cannot get these drugs directly to where the toxin acts, like directly into the cells of the brain and the spinal cord.
Those are not great situations, unfortunately. So let's sum this up really quickly. If you think your pet has gotten into rodenticide, It is absolutely crucial that you get them to the veterinary emergency room as soon as possible. Immediate medical intervention can help save your pet's life. We want to make them vomit, have you call poison control, and get them hospitalized on IV fluids with activated charcoal as soon as possible.
Now this affects their nervous system, it can [00:22:00] cause significant damage to their brain and spinal cord. So acting quickly is the best thing for them. Decreasing the chances of them absorbing is better than trying to treat the symptoms.
If they do get to the point though that they're starting to have symptoms, things like, seizures, comatose, paralysis. It could be weeks before they recover and they may not fully recover. And again, some do not always make it through this. And if they do return home. Again, they will likely have black stools for a couple of days, so don't get too worried when you see that.
Like I said, prevention is always better than the cure, right? Safeguarding the house involves being cautious with the storage of these rodenticides. Keeping the package if you're going to put them out. If the pest issue is significant, consider reaching out to a professional pest control service, and then let them know about your pets so that they can use safer methods or safer substances that are not easily available to our furry friends.
Also it was a study that was done out of [00:23:00] Tufts where researchers had recently found that certain birds of prey, like owls and hawks did have exposure to bromethalin through the prey that they eat. So we were always unsure whether the pets, if they ate a rodent, could they ingest enough to be caused to cause a problem.
But when they looked at these birds of prey that only eat rodents, right? It was found that about 30 percent of them that were tested did have bromethalin in their system. It does give us more evidence that they can possibly get exposed just by eating the rodents, not just getting into the actual rodenticide themselves.
Plus remember that this is not an immediate death, so the rodents can have that toxin in their system for days to weeks as well. So when they're starting to feel ill, that's when our dogs and cats come along, and it's easy for them to be able to catch those rodents.
So it's not always the safest thing to have bromethalin as the rodenticide of choice. So like I said, definitely talk [00:24:00] to those pest control services to decide like what the best choice is going to be. Alright, so this brings us to the end of our neurotoxic rodenticide. Remember our pets count on us to create a safe environment for them, so let's be mindful and do our best to help them.
And now we're gonna talk real quick about our animal fact. So today we're gonna talk about guinea pigs. I'm sure you're probably thinking like, what is so great about a guinea pig? They're a very common household animal, why are they, why is this a big deal? Guinea pigs are rodents, right? I'm using this because they should actually be very affected by this neurotoxic rodenticide, bromethalin, right?
Should be just as toxic to them as rats and mice. But, actually, they're not really affected and they can get insanely high doses and still not be affected. They can actually eat about a thousand times or more that of a rat or a mouse without [00:25:00] being affected, which means they could have way more than even like a dog or a cat can.
So this is because they don't have a protein that's needed to break down bromethalin into the metabolite or basically the form that is needed for bromethalin to cause a toxicity. They don't really get affected by it. Isn't that crazy? All right. I have more facts about the guinea pigs. I do love guinea pigs.
So other facts about our little guinea pigs. It is believed that about 3000 years ago, they were domesticated from areas around the Andes mountains in South America. In what we now know is Bolivia and Peru. No one a hundred percent knows why they're called guinea pigs, but the theory is that they did come to Europe by boat from South America.
And back then, things that came from like far away were referred to as guinea, which is a possible reason why it's part of their name. They're also referred to pigs possibly because of like the squealing noises that they make or the way that they act like more like a [00:26:00] pig. In fact, the males are even called boars and the females are called sows, just like we call them in pigs.
They are rodents though, and more specifically they're from the Caviidae family, which more specifically, it refers to rodents of South America. Some other little fun facts about them. When they get really excited, they may hop in the air. It's called popcorning. You should look it up. And they're actually really good swimmers.
And while they can't climb, they can jump over obstacles like dogs do. And if you've never owned one they can be various social creatures. I did help rescue several of them, and they were always super nice. They always let me do so many things to them, because most of the time I'd get them when they had problems, and I would try to help fix them.
The biggest obstacles to owning them are usually going to be that they need their cage cleaned rather frequently to avoid problems with their feet. And they also have to be given extra vitamin C, because they cannot produce it themselves. [00:27:00] We talk about like scurvy in people. For people who remember that from pirates, our guinea pigs get scurvy as well.
So we have to make sure we give them extra vitamin C too. All right. Again, you should go look up popcorning in our guinea pigs. Very cute. Thanks again for tuning into Vetsplanation, where we bring clarity to the jargon jungle of veterinary medicine.
So join me next week as we unravel the next interesting topic of our rodenticides and until then, make sure to keep your four legged friends happy, healthy, and safe.
Thank you, everyone.
Thank you guys for listening this week. If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or you just want to say hi, you can email me at Suggs, S U G G S @ VetsplanationPodcast.com or visit the website at VetsplanationPodcast.com or find us on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok at Vetsplanation. Thank you all for listening and I'll see you back here next week.[00:28:00]