Sudden death of my friend's macaw

[bindiya]

Can somebody please throw some light on the cause of death. Perfectly fine in the morning, was eating and drinking normally till a few hours ago. Chest bone is sticking out as seen in picture, feathers on the chest are also not normal. He was under treatment for deworming.
He is devastated and at a loss as to what happened, pls help...

Note-Avian vets here in India are few and have little experience.

 

[Flboy]

So very sorry! No ideas, but I am moving you back up the list.

 

[wrench13]

Also no idea, but please pass my sincere condolences to your friend. It is so heart breaking to loose a pet, especially a feathered one that depended on you for its well being.

 

[Anansi]

Please convey my condolences to your friend as well. I felt a pang just looking at the pictures.

Unfortunately, there really is no way to know with any degree of certainty what happened to your friend's macaw without a necropsy. It could've been any number of things, from a foreign object ingested, to disease, to an adverse reaction to his medication.

Given the degree to which his keel bone appears to be protruding in the pic, he seems to be very underweight. Was his poop normal? Or was food passing through relatively undigested? If so, this symptom combined with his eating normally and still remaining underweight could indicate PDD. Does your friend know what his bird's weight was?

The chest feathering looks to be a plucking issue, which may or may not be connected to his cause of death. (Some birds with PDD are known to pluck in their frustration.)

Again, this is just a guess and there really is no way to be certain short of a necropsy.

 

[BIRDIGIRL]

So sorry for your loss and I hope you get an answer to your questions as its very hard to take a sudden death like that. I dont have a Macaw but I wondered what PDD is...sorry in advance if thats a silly question. Again my condolances

 

[Anansi]

So sorry for your loss and I hope you get an answer to your questions as its very hard to take a sudden death like that. I dont have a Macaw but I wondered what PDD is...sorry in advance if thats a silly question. Again my condolances

Not a silly question at all. PDD stands for Proventricular Dilation Disease, so named for one of its telltale symptoms: dilation of the proventriculus (basically, the first of the bird's stomachs). It is this dilation that allows for so much of the eaten food to pass through the bird's GI tract undigested. The walls of the proventriculus are too far away to properly engage the digestive process.

PDD derives from 2 out of the 9 strains of Avian Bornavirus (ABV). There is some debate as to exactly how it is transmitted and just how contagious it is, but most cases seem to stem from vertical transmission (parent to child). Symptoms can also present in the crop and nervous system as well.

At the moment, while there are ways to slow its progress, there is no cure. (Although one group claims to have discovered a cure. The claims, however, have yet to be verified. To the best of my knowledge, anyway.)

 

[s_car_go]

PDD is Proventricular dilatation disease. Often called Macaw wasting syndrome.

SYMPTOMS;

The clinical presentation of this disease varies with the individual as well as in severity of those symptoms. Often the symptoms include a gastrointestinal component, but many times birds suffering from this disease will present with neurologic signs as well, or in lieu of digestive anomalies.

Gastrointestinal signs may include: Regurgitation, crop impaction, poor appetite, weight loss, or passage of undigested food in the feces. Neurologic symptoms may include: Weakness, ataxia, paresis, proprioceptive deficits, head tremors, and rarely seizures. Muscle wasting and a generalized poor body condition is usually found as well. The virus can also affect the Purkinje cells of the heart, the adrenal medulla, the brain, and the spinal cord.

On necropsy the affected organs appear dilated and may include the crop, proventriculus, ventriculus, and small intestine. On histopathological examination the tissues will contain a lymphoplasmacytic infiltration in the peripheral and central nervous tissue. The causative virus is believed to commonly affect the myenteric plexuses which will also lead to the presentation of atrophied smooth muscle within the affected gastrointestinal organs. It is this atrophy and loss of tone in the organs that causes the dilation and subsequent gastrointestinal symptoms which are commonly the first sign of disease for the owners.

 

[JerseyWendy]

Gosh, those photos are so very difficult to look at. My deepest condolences to the loss of your friend's GW!

You said he was under treatment for de-worming. What exactly was given to him?

 

[bindiya]

Anasi even I thought about PDD. The birds droppings were normal however and no undigested food was there. Ivermectin was being used for deworming.There was however no noticeable feather plucking.Thanks to all of you who took out time to reply...
My other question is that could it be transmitted to the other macaw living in the same cage?

 

[Anansi]

When my Bixby died of PDD he'd never passed any undigested food, either. That's a possible symptom, but it doesn't always occur. Sometimes the neurological symptoms show, first. Also, having PDD opens the door to potentially fatal secondary infections as well.

As for whether it could have been transmitted to the other macaw, it's hard to say. Some think it's only transferred vertically, while others believe that it can happen horizontally. Especially if the other macaw's immune system is already compromised.

Safest course would be to assume there's a possibility that his illness could have been transmitted. Given that we don't truly know if it's even PDD at this point, it's actually the responsible thing. It might have been something far more aggressively contagious for all we know.