ohmidog!

It has been a long wait, but Kabang, the Filipino dog who lost the top half of her snout when she saved two young girls from an oncoming motorcycle, has received the first in a series of dental and facial surgeries.

On Tuesday, surgeons removed her two upper premolar teeth and reconstructed her left eyelid, according to the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine blog that is tracking her progress.

The mixed-breed dog, thought to be around 2 years old, was flown in October the California veterinary hospital, where vets discovered she also had vaginal cancer and heartworm.

That led to long delays before her planned facial surgeries – aimed not a rebuilding her snout, but at making it easier for her to breathe and avoid infections.

Kabang’s upper snout was torn off by the motorcycle’s spokes when she darted between it and the girls in December 2011.

Surgeons say, after a recovery period, a second and final facial surgery will take place later this month.

Kabang received six intravenous chemotherapy treatments for her venereal tumor and has completed her treatment for heartworm disease.

Once recovered from the surgeries, the dog will likely go back to Zamboanga City in southern region of the Philippines and be reunited with her owner, Rudy Bunggal, who took in Kabang as a stray puppy.

Witnesses say Rudy’s 9-year-old daughter, Dina, and her 3-year-old cousin, Princess Diansing, were crossing a busy street in the path of a motorcycle when the dog lunged at its tires.

After hearing of Kabang’s heroics and her plight, Karen Kenngott, a nurse in upstate New York, launched a fundraising drive to bring the dog to America to get the treatments she needs.

(Photo: Don Preisler / UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine)

Kabang, the dog who lost half her snout saving two young girls, appears to have beaten cancer, getting one step closer to the surgical procedures that veterinarians hope will close the gaping wound on her face.

Kabang had the upper half of her snout sheared off when she jumped in front of a speeding motorcycle in the Philippines, saving her owner’s daughter and niece from injury.

She ended up at the University of California, Davis, after a nurse in New York launched a fundraising campaign to bring her to the U.S. for treatment.

Veterinarians at UC Davis plan two to three surgeries that, while they won’t restore her face, will make it more functional and less prone to infection. But those couldn’t be done until Kabang’s other problems were addressed, including cancer and heartworms.

After completing six weekly intravenous chemotherapy infusions, Kabang appears to have beaten the cancer, Gina Davis, the primary care veterinarian at the William R. Pritchard Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital in Davis, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Vets are now addressing the issue of heartworms, which couldn’t be fully treated during her chemotherapy. The first of three heartworm shots was administered on Dec. 4, and she’s expected to receive the other two in the second week of January, Davis said.

“It will be one to two months for her to recover from that before she goes in and has the surgery,” Davis said.

The first surgery will involve dental work, extractions and covering exposed roots. The others will try to close the dog’s wound and restore nasal functions. The dog’s bony structures are currently exposed to air, increasing the chance of infection, Davis said.

“She has come through everything very well,” Davis said. “Her appetite is still good. She’s still bright and happy.”

(Photo: Don Preisler, UC Davis)

Heartworm and a cancerous tumor have delayed snout surgery for Kabang, the Philippine dog that lost half her face when she stepped between two children and an oncoming motorcycle.

A veterinarian at the University of California, Davis, says both could be potentially fatal if not treated.

“Fortunately for Kabang, her disease is not very advanced,” Dr. Jane Sykes, a UC Davis infectious disease specialist, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “She has a good prognosis.”

Sykes said veterinarians will have to treat the two ailments — including chemotherapy for the tumor — and that it could be as long as six months before her snout problems can be addressed.

Donations from 20 countries financed Kabang’s trip to the U.S. Vets at the William R. Pritchard Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital plan at least two surgeries, one focusing on dental work and the other to close the gaping wound on her face, which, left open, could lead to infection.

But before that can happen they need to treat the heartworm and the cancerous tumor, which vets say was sexually transmitted.

Sykes said more than 90 percent of such cases are cured with chemotherapy.

Both the tumor and the heartworm are common ailments in tropical  regions where dogs run loose, as in the Philippines.

Kabang was originally found in a swamp near Zamboanga by a man who planned on feeding her to his family. But the dog bonded with Rudy Bunggal’s 11-year-old daughter and his 3-year-old niece and last year stepped between them and a motorcycle, shearing off her snout.

Kabang disappeared for two weeks after the motorcycle accident, but was greeted as a hero when she returned to Bunggal’s home.

She delivered six puppies at a local dog pound in April of this year, apparently having become pregnant during her two week disappearance.

Sykes said Kabang is “a pleasure to work with … It is wonderful that people have seen how wonderful dogs can be to human lives. … I think we owe her a service in return.”

While missing the top of her snout, Kabang is able to lap up food and water with her tongue, Sykes said, and may still be able to smell some things.

Vets are also seeking permission from her owner to spay Kabang.

Veterinarians at the University of California, Davis, say they are confident they can improve the condition of Kabang, the dog who lost her snout and upper jaw when she jumped in front of a motorcycle, saving two little girls from harm.

Kabang arrived at the school from the Philippines last week, nearly a year after the accident, and was given an hour-long preliminary exam.

A mixed-breed dog, Kabang lunged in front of two girls — the daughter and niece of her owner — that were crossing a roadway in Zamboanga City. Her snout and upper jaw became caught in the motorcycle’s spokes, leaving her with only half a face.

An international campaign raised the money to bring Kabang to the United States for a consultation with veterinary reconstructive surgery specialists at UC Davis.

Vets at William R. Pritchard Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital don’t plan to fullyy reconstruct Kabang’s snout, or fit her with a prosthetic. Instead, they are attempting to close the gaping wound on her face, preventing further infections.

Kabang is expected to be at UC Davis for at least six weeks.

Veterinary surgeons Boaz Arzi and Frank Verstraete assessed Kabang’s overall condition and conducted blood and urine tests last week.

“We are pleased with what we discovered today,” Verstraete said. “We are confident we can improve her condition going forward.”

Arzi and Verstraete are consulting with Anton Mari H. Lim, Kabang’s veterinarian from the Philippines, who accompanied Kabang on the trip, to develop a treatment plan.

Kabang’s owner found her as an abandoned puppy in a paddy field, and, according to reports, initially kept the dog with the intention of feeding it to his family.

But his 11-year-old daughter and 3-year-old niece grew close to Kabang — her name means “spotty” in Visayan – and the dog became protective of them.

Arzi and Verstraete anticipate that Kabang will need at least two surgeries. The first likely would focus on dental work. The second would attempt to close the gaping wound on the dog’s face, protecting her from infection.

The veterinary hospital’s website includes background information on Kabang, and will feature updates on her progress. You can find a collection of photos of her arrival here.

(Photos: Veterinary medical student Heather Kennedy greets Kabang during an intake exam at William R. Pritchard Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital at UC Davis; courtesy of UC Davis, by Gregory Urquiaga)

With donations coming in from people in 18 different countries, enough money has been raised to bring Kabang, the Philippine dog who lost her snout to save two children, to the United States for surgery.

Kabang departed for the U.S. Monday.

Veterinarian Anton Mari Lim accompanied her during the trip, GMA News reported.

Kabang, whose owners make about $3.50 a day, will receive the $20,000 surgery at the University of California, Davis.

A mixed breed street dog from Zamboanga City, Kabang suffered extensive injuries to her nose, face and upper jaw after being hit by a motorcycle last winter, leaving her with only half a snout.

Kabang reportedly “threw herself” in the path of the motorcycle, keeping it from hitting two girls, 11 an 3, who were crossing the street. Neither the girls nor the driver of the motorcycle were seriously injured.

Kabang’s snout got stuck in the motorcycle’s front wheel and the top of it was ripped off.

The wound, veterinarians say, will requires maxilla facial specialty surgery to restore function and properly close the wounds

Veterinarians, who have been giving Kabang antibiotics to slow down the infection from her wounds and vitamins to boost her immune system, says she’s in good enough shape now to undergo the surgery.

One vet in the Philipppines compared Kabang’s situation to an air conditioner without a filter.

“When you take out the whole snout you’re taking out the filter. So whatever dust, whatever germs is in the environment it goes straight into the lungs.”

A year and a half after a starved pit bull was found at the bottom of a trash chute at a Newark high rise apartment — looking more like a corpse than a pet — the dog who would go on to be named Patrick is doing great.

Progressing far less quickly are court case against his former owner, and a proposed bill, named after Patrick, that would bring stiffer penalties against those who abuse and neglect animals.

Patrick’s Law would increase penalties against those who abuse and neglect animals. Last week,  it cleared the New Jersey Senate Economic Growth Committee, but it still requires approval by another committee and both houses of the legislature.

The bill (S1303) would make certain acts of neglect and abuse fourth-degree offenses and increases the civil penalties — up to $3,000 for a first offense and $5,000 for a second offense, according to NJ.com. If an animal dies, offenders could be charge with a third-degree crime, which carries stricter penalties.

Sponsored by Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean Jr., it would also increase the penalties for dogfighting; failing to provide an animal with proper food, water and shelter; and leaving animals unattended in hot cars.

Patrick was found in March 2011 in a garbage chute at Garden Spires.

His former owner, Newark resident Kisha Curtis, was charged with animal cruelty and remains free on $10,000 bond. Curtis has entered a plea of not guilty and has rejected a plea deal under which she would serve 18 months in prison, pay a $5,000 fine and serve 30 days of community service.

Instead, she wants to enter a pretrial intervention program,which would involve no jail time and, once completed, leave her without a record.

That’s now under consideration by Newark Superior Court Judge Joseph Cassini III, who agreed last month to review documents from the Department of Children and Family Services regarding Curtis and her childhood.

Curtis admits to abandoning Patrick, but says she “never harmed” the dog and that she had only had him for a few days. She is not accused of throwing the dog down the chute, only of neglecting and abandoning him.

Patrick, meanwhile — after months of veterinary care and intensive rehabilitation at Garden State Veterinary Specialists in Tinton Falls, N.J.–  is happy and healthy.

Who will eventually be awarded custody of him is still at issue, but it definitely won’t be Kisha Curtis.

(Photo: Tony Kurdzuk / The Newark Star-Ledger)

A dog who has been credited with saving the lives of two young girls in the Philippines — and lost part of her snout in the process — may soon be flown to the United States for reconstructive surgery.

Kabang reportedly “threw herself” in the path of a motorcycle in February.

According to the News Inquirer, the motorcycle had been speeding down a street in Zamboanga City, when cousins Dina Bunggal, 11, and Princess Diansing, 3, stepped into its path.

Kabang “emerged from nowhere” and jumped in front of the motorcycle. Neither the girls nor the driver of the motorcycle were seriously injured.

Kabang, owned by Bunggal’s family, was. Badly. Her snout got stuck in the motorcycle’s front wheel and the top of it was ripped off.

“The bones holding her upper snout were crushed, and we could not do anything to save it. We just pulled her off the wheel,” said Rudy Bunggal, Dina’s father.

The family refused to allow the dog to be euthanized.

“It does not matter if she’s ugly now. What is important to us is she saved our children and we cannot thank her enough for that,” Bunggal said.

While seeming to recover, and becoming pregnant, Kabang remains at risk for infections.

But between Kabang’s heroics, and help from animal welfare organizations, donations are coming in, and the family hopes to send the dog to the veterinary hospital at University of California in Davis to get the wounds fully treated and closed, according to Dog Heirs.

The trip and surgery are expect to cost $20,000. The Bunggal family makes about $3.50 a day.

“The more time that goes by, the more Kabang is at risk of infection … Her chances are better the sooner she can get those wounds closed,” said Karen Kenngott, the US coordinator for the Animal Welfare Coalition.

Meanwhile, in the Philippines, Kabang has become a “superstar,” the family says. ”People come here to have their photos taken with the dog. Some came with medicines and vitamins,” Bunggal told the News Inquirer. Others have donated money and clothes to the family.

“We are so thankful. We did not ask for those things, but still we are thankful.”

(Photo: From Alvin Sabay’s blog, The World Behind My Wall. More photos of Kabang can be found there.)

Maybe this is a case of making the best of a bad situation.

Maybe it’s a case of man’s best friend making for an even better scientific paper.

Maybe, as much as I write about my dog, I have no room to talk.

In any event, at least as reported by Discover magazine, a UC Davis veterinarian’s dog got into the lab trash and consumed 15 agar plates containing thallium.

Thallium is a poisonous compound used in labs to isolate Mycoplasma fungi. (As the article points out, it has also been used by murderers, and was a favorite of Saddam Hussein.)

Being a vet, the dog’s owner did what he could, including administering intravenous fluids and, eventually, a gastric feeding tube. He took notes, ran tests and documented the one-year-old shepherd mix’s slow death in a study entitled, “Thallium toxicosis in a dog consequent to ingestion of Mycoplasma agar plates.”

According to an abstract of the paper: “Clinical signs over the course of 2-3 weeks included vomiting, diarrhea, weight loss, alopecia, dysphonia, ataxia, paresthesia, intension tremors, megaesophagus with subsequent aspiration pneumonia, and several seizure episodes.”

The owner/scientist measured Thallium concentrations in the dog’s hair and took blood samples at regular intervals.

After the dog’s death, the scientist/owner concluded, “Hair and blood samples are useful specimens to reach an accurate diagnosis even if taken several weeks post exposure. The postexposure blood and hair thallium concentrations reported in this case are useful data for diagnosticians investigating dogs with potential thallium poisoning.”

Not exactly the stuff of Jack London, but then again, this was a paper written for the Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation. Still, that the dog’s name is never acknowledged, despite her accidental contribution to scientific knowledge, is troubling.

Why does science have to be so cold? What would it lose by showing some heart?

The Discover magazine article, while putting things in slightly more understandable form, isn’t exactly touchy-feely, either:

“At the onset, the dog refused to eat and lost weight. And then things only got worse over several weeks as she lost control of her muscles, seized, caught pneumonia twice, and lost a third of her fur. She had to be fed through a tube. It took 10 months for her to even bark again…”

Ten months???

“While we’re glad this dog’s suffering was not in vain, we had to wonder how common thallium poisoning really is. Thallium used to be a common pesticide, but that’s been banned because it’s also such a potent human-cide. Outside of biology labs, thallium can be found in electronics and glass manufacturing or nuclear reactors, so please don’t bring your dog to work if your job is in any of those places.”

To me, the bigger question in all this, outside of whether anyone was neglectful, is how much and how long the anonymous dog suffered — whether she was kept alive for the purposes of gathering a little more data.

It wouldn’t be the first time.

It’s amazing how much scientists learn from dogs. What’s more amazing is how much they don’t.

A researcher who I’m guessing doesn’t have a dog says pets don’t belong in the bed, and that allowing them to sleep with us can lead to infections, parasites and diseases.

He further advises that anyone who is licked by a dog wash the area immediately.

To me, a guy who has spent the last eight months with my dog nearly constantly at my side during our travels across America — including in whatever bed we happen to be sleeping in at night — that seems a massive over-reaction.

Bruno Chomel, a professor at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, says that, while such cases aren’t common, people have contracted infections from sleeping with, kissing and being licked by their pets. Chomel and fellow researcher Ben Sun, of the California Department of Public Health, express their views in the latest issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

I don’t subscribe to that publication, because my theory is the surest way to get a disease is not from sleeping with your dog, but from reading about that disease.

Though I sleep with my dog nightly, I’m not so much concerned about Zoonoses, or diseases transmitted to humans by animals, as I am about Merckitis, a chronic case of which I’ve suffered from since childhood.

It stemmed from a big blue book called The Merck Manual, on my mother’s bookshelf, which allowed you to, based on your symptoms, diagnose your medical issue, read about the treatment and determine, in my case, if I was going to live to see 13.

I must have diagnosed myself with a dozen different diseases, many of them fatal, in the course of matching up my symptoms — usually those of a common cold — with the worst  possible maladies.

I remember one night that — congested, unable to breathe through my nose and worried that my throat breathing pipe (non-medical term) might close up – I gathered the necessary supplies to perform an emergency tracheotomy (bic pen, with the ink part removed, pocket knife, duck tape) and kept them under my bed, alongside the book.

The Internet has made it much easier to wrongly self diagnose — just a few clicks and you can jump to the conclusion that you have the most dreaded disease imaginable. The key word there being imaginable. In a way, those medical self-help websites, rather than lessen the need for doctors, only create more of one as we, fueled by our fears, rush to confirm our faulty self diagnoses.

Pulled muscle? I was sure it was a heart attack.

Of course, such concerns are not always entirely baseless, and many of them should be checked out by professionals. But often, they’re only in our heads — having been placed there by WebMD, yourdiagnosis.com, familydoctor.org and the like. Often they are really far-fetched, instilling a fear out of all proportion with reality, which is the case with Chomel’s study, or at least his remarks:

“I think pets can be very nice in the home environment, but certainly, they don’t belong on the bed,” Chomel told LiveScience.

Chomel says humans can contract bubonic plague from flea-infested pets, bacterial infections resistant to multiple strains of antibiotics, and various parasitic worms.

Since 1974, Chomel says, multiple cases of plague have been associated with people in the southwestern U.S. who allowed flea-infested cats to sleep with them. And in a  2008 outbreak, a study found that people infected with bubonic plague were “more likely to have shared a bed with a dog than uninfected counterparts.” (Despite that, I still don’t recommend sharing a bed with uninfected counterparts.)

The authors cite surveys conducted in the U.S., the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands that show up to 45 percent of dogs sleep in their owners’ bed.

Several reports of bacterial infections have been attributed to sharing a bed with pets, and in “multiple” cases, they report, patients acquired various infections after allowing their dogs or cats to lick wounds or damaged skin.

That’s the total opposite of my philosophy. Whenever I get a boo-boo, the first thing I do is let Ace lick it. Then it feels better. If thousands of microscopic parasites enter my bloodstream by doing so, so be it … join the party, fellas.

Don’t tell me not to sleep with my dog, especially when it’s this cold. That’s like saying, because there may be some impurities in the air, I should stop breathing. I’m going to continue to engage in both risky behaviors.

And if worse comes to worst I can always, after consulting my Merck Manual, perform an emergency tracheotomy.

OUR FAVORITE READER COMMENT: “Pity poor Chomel. He has obviously not enjoyed the delight of a canine companion…I’ve spent the past 50 years sleeping with dogs – most of the canine persuasion – and if anything it must have strengthened my immune system … The plague? Only a plague of comfort and love. Poor Chomel.”

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