In process of chloroquine treatment for Velvet...

[traumamed]

Longtime lurker, first time poster. Wealth of information on this site and I have been very thankful this exists as a resource!

Okay so here is my situation. I'll try to keep as brief as possible. Suffice to say that I have confirmed Amyloodiniosis outbreak in my 220 DT. I have all survivors (blue hippo tang, YT, sailfin tang, scopas tang, Niger trigger, CB angel, one-spot foxface, comet, and snowflake eel) moved into a 55 HT. I have actual Aralen tabs available to me, the chloroquine phosphate that is used to treat humans for malaria. I gave everyone a 30-minute peroxide dip before moving them into the HT, and dosed the HT with a hair over 40 mg/gal chloroquine phosphate.

As of now, I am about 48 hours into treatment. Heavily infected fish, which was almost all of them, are behaving significantly better. They are eating again, displaying increased activity, and breathing is much less labored.

However - bumps are still visible on many of them. For anyone who has successfully treated velvet with CP, is it normal for bumps to persist a couple days into treatment at the sites the parasites had previously embedded? Trying to figure out if this is residual inflammatory response or if my first dose of Aralen for some reason did not work. Don't want to re-dose and end up killing them from CP toxicity, but don't want them to die of untreated velvet, either.

Thanks for any help and sorry for the length of the post!

 

[Dmorty217]

60mg/gallon is what you're looking for with velvet

 

[traumamed]

Thanks Dmorty217. Most sources I have seen seem to recommend 40 mg/gal, going to 60-80 mg/gal only for recurrent or unresponsive infections, although I have seen a couple of sources that do say to start with 60 mg/gal.

I guess what I am really after are the effects of treatment as it pertains to the disease course. For example, if you had a script for an antibiotic for a UTI, you would not be symptom-free with the first dose, or probably even the second or third - it may be a couple of days. However, you should notice some improvement. Similarly, if you cut yourself you will have a scab for a few days, even though it is healing through that time. And it is my understanding that the Amyloodinium makes a pretty nasty wound in the fish's flesh.

My fish "seem" to be getting better. Still, there are visible spots on them. On my scopas, it almost looks like residual hypopigmented macules around where the prior raised pustules were. The other fish have varying presentations of their spots, some of them raised. But every single one of them "seems" better.

So - what I am really trying to figure out is whether I need to re-dose, or stay the course for the moment under the assumption that behavioral improvement is a good sign at this point.

 

[Dmorty217]

How many days have they been in 60mg/g? I treat all fish at that dose, signs of disease or not.

 

[traumamed]

How many days have they been in 60mg/g? I treat all fish at that dose, signs of disease or not.

I did not increase the dose to 60 mg/gal, they are still at 40 mg/gal as per the initial treatment. My Comet and a bluehead wrasse I forgot to mention in my first post are having a hard time with the CP treatment so I did not want to increase unless absolutely necessary. The wrasse and Comet did not have any symptoms of Velvet but they may not make it through the treatment. :sad1:

I am glad to report that everyone has been symptom-free for at least 3 days now. I think the residual spotting I was seeing was from recovering wounds.

That leads me to problem #2: how on earth are all these fish going to survive in a 55 for another 7 weeks? Despite my QT being cycled, it can't handle the bioload. I have already had to dose Prime once for an ammonia spike. I can't run a skimmer, carbon, anything except sponge for another 13 days, (re-treatment happens in 3 days). And then there's aggression. The tangs are flashing fins at each other, and have just started doing tail-whip maneuvers. No stab wounds - yet - but it's only a matter of time. The eel won't eat. Etc. Etc. I think the only solution is going to be that I am going to have to find a new owner for at least a few of them, and fast. Other suggestions?

 

[jmm]

Water changes with pre-treated water of same CP concentration.

Partitions (egg crate's good) to separate the worst offenders.

 

[Reefes pieces]

Agree with using eggcrate as partitions as mentioned above. I also slice vinyl tubing and zip tie them to the sides of the eggcrate to get a nice and tight fit. I'm in the process of QT with CP and it works very well. I've had fish with outbreaks and recover but like you witnessed it does take a few days for physical signs of disease to go away. Main thing is you got it under control with minimal loss. Sorry that not all made it

 

[traumamed]

Egg crate with something like vinyl tubing at the edges to secure a tight fit! Very clever, thanks for the tips.