re Cipro dosage, Part 1 of 3
Hello fort2fun,
I sent you an email with some info I had copied 25 August 2005 onto a floppy, concerning info on cotrim for a vet treating a Doberman Pinacher dog. Most of the info was was how to cipro applied to humans, some of the info was general info on cipro.
BRAND NAMES: TRIBRISSEN, SEPTRA, BACTRIM, COTRIM, SULFATRIM
AVAILABLE IN
5 mg trimethoprim/25 mg sulfadiazine
20 mg trimethoprim/100 mg sulfadiazine
80 mg trimethoprim/400 mg sulfadiazine
80 mg trimethoprim/400 mg sulfamethoxazole
160 mg trimethoprim/800 mg sulfadiazine
The tablet you have is a 960 mg tablet (I use the same med for myself, so always have a supply on hand).
I have treated several pigeons with it. The first one was my pigeon
Wieteke, who was 18-days-old (on August 23, 2005) judging from an internet photo series of a growing pigeon chicks. Wieteke was a dead ringer or twin image of the squab in the pictures, and could almost pass for PT member Victor Slade's
Tooter. I noticed him while still searching for our rescued-as-a-baby and hand-raised
Pidgiepoo, who at eight-and-a-half months of age had been chased off by crows in a city park at noon on January 14th, 2005, and was never seen again.
Wieteke was on the concrete embankment under a train bridge passing over a two-lane auto road and streetcar tracks, next to the sidewalk, under steel girders where he had fallen from or was pushed from a nest. He had a sibling nearby in the dark recesses. Wieteke was well-fed, but hadn't moved in the two or three hour interval from when I first glmpsed him and then later specifically went to look at him. I had noticed that he was too close, at my eye level -- I am six foot three inches tall -- to human passersby -- (update: this very minute, as I type this, Wieteke paired on the carpet in front of me with female flightless rescue
Osk-gurr) -- and he could not use his legs, so I took him home with me. (Wieteke's feral mate
Mamieke is not allowed in the apartment, due to circumstances beyond our immediate control. Several females show interest in what is going on here, and Wieteke cases them away from the window sill because they will not/[cannot] come in, and I think Mamieke is one of them. Not sure. She is hard to tell apart. The one I think is she, also chases other females away).
Wieteke's parents had been feeding him, but he was immobile, and I would not be going by that place for several more days. I did not know how long he would continue to be fed, or if his feeding had come to an end. I had raised another 5-to-8-day-old-rescue chick
Pidgiepoo (formerly named
Vanilla Dove) to healthy adulthood. (Wieteke was at firts named
Luxie, for Luxemburger Strasse, where the train bridge was, the street heading from Cologne in the direction Luxemburg. Info for anyone looking at old, archived posts.
I took the cotrim 960 mg tablet, broke it in half where there was a crease or indentation crossing the width of the tablet for just such a purpose, pulverized it with a spoon on top of a plastic sandwich bag, kept dividng it in half wth a razor blade (very inaccurate way to do it). First division by breaking the tablet in two gave two tablet halves. Subsequent divisions performed using the razor blade and "guestimating" by eyeball. I did not try to subdivide each and every pile, because I did not require that many mini-doses. I needed at least two 12.5 mg doses a day for a duration of at least five days, I figured. There is probably some inert binding material added to the 960 milligrams of medicine, so as to make a paste which holds together and forms a tablet with integrity and good molding and drying properties. so, what the actual milligram weigh of the tablet is, I cannot determine without some research.
I figured I needed 12.5 mg powder cotrim
b.i.d. (twice a day) for a quarter-kilo (250 gram) pigeon (written 12,5 mg in Germany, usng a comma for the decimal point indicator: don't know punctuation for numbers in India or Great Britain). I figured this out from researching PT or the web. Don't have the quotations for sources available right now.
(
From memory: dose is 50 mg to 100 mg cotrim per 1000 grams of bird.
That would make it a dose of 12.5 mg to 25 mg for a 250-gram or one-quarter kilogram pigeon. Two doses per day, administered approximately 12 hours apart.
Weights of our feral pigeons in Cologne, from my personal observations:
(1) Adult males range 300 to 400 grams.
(2) Weighed a heavy, freshly-dead run-over pigeon at 400 grams. (I had stupidly dropped seeds on the street, and he was too slow at lifting off while flying in front of an accelerating car. Driver maybe couldn't see him).
(3) The few females have averaged 280 grams (ten ounces, 28.5 grams per ounce).
(4) Male adult Pidgiepoo averaged 280 grams, ten ounces.
(5) Male adult Wieteke averages 330 grams. Has ranged from 300 to 370 grams while healthy adult.
263 grams 23 August when found, afternoon.
249 grams 24 August 6:40 AM (morning, before eating).
235 grams 26 August 7:20 AM (morning, upon waking, before eating).
A month later, when he was healthy and first ventured outside on his own, he averaged 285 to 300 grams before breakfast.
Averaged 280-290 grams when he was sick in June 2006.
Some starving, sick (sex not determined) pigeons weighed 200-230 grams at rescue. Some didn't make it.
End of Part One.
Part Two follows in my next post. (1000 word limit per post).
Larry