Question: Have you used microbiology and laboratory work in the veterinary sector?

Carys Redman-White answered on 13 Jan 2022:

That’s a really good question. I do use microbiology and other lab work regularly, and it’s very satisfying! We can learn a lot from speaking to owners and examining patients but often the lab work we do is very important for diagnosis.
It’s standard in veterinary practices to have a microscope, so you can take swabs (or urine samples etc) where you think there might be an infection, stain them so the bacteria or yeast show up, and then look for the microbes. That can give you a good idea of the kind of thing you’re dealing with – for example, the shape of the microbes and where you found them both help to narrow down what species they are. But to know exactly what they are and the best antibiotic or antifungal to use, we send them away to an external lab to grow them in a Petri dish and test which antibiotics are most effective. We also often look at cells from our patients themselves under the microscope to see what’s going on, for example taking a small sample of a mystery lump to help us work out what it is.
The other main kind of lab work we do in the practice is biochemistry. We use dipsticks (like you may have used to measure pH) to check urine for traces of blood and protein and to check the acidity/alkalinity. We also use specialised equipment to check the levels of key chemicals in the blood. For example, we look at levels of a chemical called creatinine to give us an idea of how well the kidneys are working. The kidneys are responsible for getting rid of creatinine, so when creatinine is high, it can be a warning sign that they’re not working so well – we call creatinine a “biomarker” because we can use it to check if something’s wrong, even if the chemical itself doesn’t cause any problems.
Finally, a lot of vet practices have a machine to count the different types of blood cells in a blood sample, which can tell us a lot. For example, there are quite a few types of white blood cells, and having unusual (high or low) levels of each can indicate different kinds of disease.