Today I would like to share an interesting case that I encountered in the Internal Medicine rotation. The patient was an 8 years old labrador (who is a detection dog indeed! Cool!) who suffered from fever for more than 2 weeks, until in the third week after the antibiotics treatment the body temperature returned to normal.

In humans, we got a fever most probably due to infections (apart from the sides effects of vaccination lately), however in dogs the number one reason for fever is immunological-mediated causes, for instance, immune-mediated polyarthritis, hemolytic anemia, systemic lupus erythematosus, etc. In fact, many clinical cases ended with sudden recovery without any diagnosis nor treatment! In such cases, the etiology would often be termed as “Fever of unknown origin”.

Back to the case, the patient was responsive to antibiotics treatment, combined with the abnormal indices shown in urinalysis (no bacteria was successfully cultured though), therefore the cause of the fever should probably be urinary tract infection.

－Linda