What are the common misconceptions about muskrat breeding and medication?

Because muskrats have strong disease resistance and immunity, farmers often pay little attention to medication during breeding, and even administer drugs indiscriminately, causing some unnecessary losses and harm to muskrat breeding. These problems can be summarized into the following phenomena:
1. Blind medication   Some farmers and breeding farms lose their composure as soon as disease breaks out, and without analyzing the disease, they medicate blindly. For example, if respiratory symptoms are found, they use drugs for the respiratory tract; if E. coli is found, they use drugs for E. coli, not realizing that many respiratory conditions and E. coli are secondary to certain diseases. As a result, after using a drug once and finding no improvement, they conclude that the drug is not effective and immediately switch to another drug…… This leads to two outcomes: one is that the disease is cured by luck, but at a great cost in medication; the other is that the treatment opportunity is missed, with heavy losses. Therefore, when disease occurs in a colony of muskrats in clinical practice, it is essential to promptly ask experienced professional technical personnel to confirm the cause, formulate a correct treatment plan, and medicate according to the symptoms, so as to minimize economic losses.
2. Excessive dosage   Any drug, as long as it is used within its safe dosage range, can achieve a good therapeutic effect. However, some farmers believe that the larger the dose, the better the effect, and blindly increase the dosage when using it, which greatly increases the cost of medication. Moreover, cases of poisoning due to excessive dosage are very common in clinical practice, and this should draw special attention from the broad community of farmers.
3. Insufficient dosage    For economic reasons, some farmers often split a single dose into one or even two days of use, resulting in an insufficient dose. Such usage cannot possibly cure the disease. In addition, they fail to consider the loss of ingredients during the pellet-making process. These issues are all very critical, and the lost portion must be taken into account and the amount appropriately increased.
4. Arbitrary drug mixing    In clinical practice, combining two or more drugs for use and achieving the expected therapeutic purpose after compatibility is rational compatibility, whereas drug compatibility that brings inconvenience or adverse consequences to treatment after two or more drugs are used together is called incompatibility (for example, when penicillin and gentamicin are mixed for use, the latter becomes ineffective). Some farmers one-sidedly believe that combining several drugs for use will enhance their effect, and therefore arbitrarily mix several drugs together. This way of medicating carries great risk and can easily result in “losing both the lady and the troops.”
5. Wrong route of administration   For example, some farmers, when weaning young muskrats, often take the easy way out and dissolve drugs suitable only for injection, such as “penicillin,” in water for muskrats to drink, not realizing that “penicillin” will be broken down and lose its efficacy after being in water for too long, thereby causing losses through drug misuse. There is also the practice of using drugs that do not dissolve in water to provide drinking water for muskrats, which is a major misconception.
6. Improper timing of administration   To ensure that a drug exerts its therapeutic effect, mastering the timing of administration is crucial. For example, for a muskrat suffering from a respiratory disease, when it has frequent coughing and thick secretions in the respiratory tract that are difficult to cough up, it is not appropriate to relieve the cough immediately; instead, soluble expectorants should be chosen. When there is not much secretion in the respiratory tract, analgesic and antitussive drugs should be used, along with appropriate antibacterial and anti-inflammatory drugs to ensure efficacy.
Because farmers use too large or too small a dosage, incorrect drug compatibility, and other incorrect methods of use, great harm is brought to the breeding industry. The main aspects are as follows:
1. Manifested as cumulative poisoning   For example, after repeated or long-term use of chloramphenicol drugs, bone marrow hematopoietic function is inhibited, leading to thrombocytopenic purpura, agranulocytosis, aplastic anemia, and hemolytic anemia, etc., thereby affecting immune function. Another example is injectable aminoglycoside antibiotics such as gentamicin, streptomycin, and kanamycin, which mainly damage the auditory nerve and kidneys when administered by injection or intravenous injection.
2. Manifested as allergic reactions under certain conditions, such as allergic reactions to penicillins, and after taking lomefloxacin, animals develop photosensitive reactions under strong light exposure.
3. Long-term use of broad-spectrum antibiotics leads to superinfection after drug withdrawal. In the muskrat's body, beneficial and harmful bacterial flora coexist in the intestinal tract. Broad-spectrum antibiotics kill both flora at the same time, and after drug withdrawal, other harmful bacteria seize the opportunity to invade, causing secondary infection. For example, oxytetracycline and tetracycline drugs often disrupt the digestive tract.
4. The simultaneous use of multiple drugs causes the detoxification and excretion functions of the liver and kidney organs to be overwhelmed, with weakened function or damage to organ tissues, and the harm is even more serious when drugs are blindly and massively repeated.
Therefore, when disease occurs on a breeding farm, farmers must find highly skilled technicians with rich clinical experience to promptly make an accurate diagnosis of the disease, use drugs rationally, and reduce the losses caused by the disease to a minimum.