I'm not a vet and this entry should not be interpreted as advice on how to treat your particular animals but only as general information which you can use to inform yourself in your relations with your own vet regarding the treatment of your animals.
The photo of your animal looks to me like it could show a systemic infection (ie. one which will not respond to external treatments alone). Skin ulcers can start out as pure skin infections with no systemic consequences or they can be a symptom of a more serious infection affecting the whole body. If your animal shows any sign of generalised swelling of the whole body then you probably have a systemic infection that will only respond to antibiotics (or similar powerful synthetic drugs). If your animal is seriously ill and you want to cure it you probably won't have time to wait for a conclusive laboratory diagnosis, but you may want to treat it on the basis of a broad spectrum approach. If the cause is a virus then there probably is no treatment except keeping its tank clean and dosing its tank with a general antiseptic such as Myxacin and adding vitamins and minerals in the hope that the animal cures itself. If the cause is a bacterium then you could ask your vet to inject it with a broad spectrum antibiotic combination (biased towards killing gram negative bacteria) such as amikacin at a rate of 10mg per kg plus ceftazidime at a rate of 50mg per kg. This combination will kill most bacteria that cause amphibian disease, but they do have to be injected and can't be given by bath nor by mouth. Whereas the cost of these drugs is negligible because the quantity you would be using is so small, the vet would still have to break open the smallest vial he has available and make up a solution for injecting using saline to a total volume which he can manage (ie. about 100 microlitres (one tenth ml)). The two antibiotics would have to be injected separately (ie. not mixed together in the same syringe), and may have to be repeated at daily intervals for several days. Other antibiotics which can be given by mouth/bath such as the tetracyclines, the 4-quinolones (eg. enrofloxacin), chloramphenicol, potentiated sulphonamides, amoxicillin, the macrolides all have drawbacks because they have large or important gaps in their spectra of activity and therefore fail in broad spectrum treatments. If the cause is a fungus then there is now a very effective group of oral antifungals called the triazoles which have been used to treat amphibian disease. In particular, the triazole Itraconazole (commonly known as Sporanox) has been used and described by Nichols and Lamirande ( see Declining Amphibian Populations Task Force newsletter 'Froglog' number 46, August 2001); the only affordable form of this drug appears to be the capsules containing coated beads; these would need to be broken open and the beads ground to powder in a mortar, and the powder dissolved in dilute acid by vigorous shaking (a solution using fish pH treatments can be prepared to a pH of 5 (which is generally safe for amphibia)) . Nichols and Lamirande used a solution of 100mg per litre for 5 minutes per day, however this concentration is very high and can't be used as a permanent bath. A dose of 4mg per kg body weight once or twice a day is considered safe, so a permanent bath of 4mg per litre, volume equal to twice the newts volume, changed every day should be safe. You could try either method.
If you treat your newt on the basis of a bacterial infection when it is a fungal one or vice versa, you could make matters worse than not treating at all, so it is best to treat for both types at the same time.
Your problem may not even be viral, bacterial or fungal, but may in fact be caused by protozoans, in which case the itraconazole may or may not be effective.
I would therefore start with a broad spectrum approach using amikacin plus ceftazidime plus itraconazole, and if you really want to spend a mint then have swabs taken and sent to a lab for analysis, but I wouldn't hold out much hope for a positive laboratory result.
One other thing you need to bear in mind is that 'curing' an animal of an infection is in itself a very stressful thing, and that even if you do 'kill' the infection your animal may still die from shock.
I wish you all the very best.
andrew read
