Iditarod 2006: Dog Death in Alaska - pneumonia

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http://ktva.com/topstory/ci_3586698

Iditarod 2006: Dog Death
KTVA Staff

The Iditarod is reporting it's first dog death: a four-year-old male from the team of Nenana musher, Noah Burmeister.
Race marshal, Mark Nordman, says Burmeister noticed the dog seemed ill crossing the Alaska Range from Rainy Pass to Roehn so he put it in his sled.

?He put it in the basket and carried it into Roehn. And vets looked at the dog immediately, of course. And they had some major concerns. So, the dog was flown from Roehn right back to Anchorage directly,? said Mark Nordman, race marshal.

Nordman says the dog died around six Thursday morning from symptoms that look a lot like pneumonia. He says Burmeister was allowed to continue on in the race but that the musher is definitely mourning his lost dog.

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Re: Iditarod 2006: Dog Death in Alaska - pneumonia

3 more dead

Elevated fatality rate unexplained

By CRAIG MEDRED and KEVIN KLOTT
Anchorage Daily News

Published: March 13, 2006
Last Modified: March 13, 2006 at 08:13 AM

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Standings
Rank Musher (bib)
1 Jeff King (30)
2 Doug Swingley (5)
3 Paul Gebhardt (84)
4 DeeDee Jonrowe (31)
5 Bjornar Andersen (35)
6 John Baker (56)
7 Aliy Zirkle (26)
8 Aaron Burmeister (10)
9 Jason Barron (29)
10 Mitch Seavey (12)

Standing provided by iditarod.com
? 2005 Iditarod Trail Committee, Inc.

Full standings ?

The death of Cupid -- a 4-year-old female husky -- on Sunday brought to three the number of dogs to have died this year in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

With the 1,100-mile race still a long way from finished, the death rate is already the highest since 1997 when five dogs died. Veterinarians who man every checkpoint along the trail from Anchorage to Nome don't know why.

All of the deaths have come in teams traveling at conservative speeds near the middle or back of the Iditarod pack. Two were in teams of young dogs that were being taken up the trail to get a look at the terrain and see what the race was about.

Noah Burmeister of Nenana was on the sled behind the first of those teams. He was on a training run with older brother Aaron's "puppy team.'' At Rainy Pass in the Alaska Range only two days into the race, he asked veterinarians to look at a dog he didn't think was performing properly. They cleared it to go on.

Noah, who was trying to get all 16 of his dogs to Nome for the experience, decided that with the vets OK he'd keep Yellowknife in the team instead of dropping it at the checkpoint to be sent back to Anchorage. Yellowknife faltered on the way to the next checkpoint at Rohn.

Burmeister carried it in his sled. From there, the dog was taken by medevac to Anchorage for treatment, but died. Veterinarians blamed "aspiration pneumonia,'' the infection of the lungs with gastric fluids.

University of Texas A&M veterinarian Michael Willard, a professor in the Department of Small Animal Medicine Surgery, has been studying this problem in Iditarod sled dogs since 2000. He says it is possible for the animals to cough up fluids and inhale them without mushers knowing.

Dogs, he has reported, can also develop gastric ulcers that can cause internal bleeding and death. He and colleague Mike Davis have been working on trying to find a way to detect such problems prior to the race without the costly and potentially dangerous process of endoscopy, which involves making a small incision into the dogs' stomach so they can insert a device to look inside.

"During my first year working at the Iditarod,'' Davis was quoted as saying in a Texas A&M veterinary publication, "we (did scope) about 70 dogs and found that there was about a 45 percent incidence of GI (gastrointestinal) erosion, bleeding and ulceration. This was much higher than what anyone would expect in what are otherwise clinically, happy, healthy dogs.''

It is not known yet whether gastrointestinal problems are linked to the deaths of the two other dogs that died this year.

One of these dogs died Thursday in the team of David Sawatzky from Healy. He was between the Cripple and Ruby checkpoints about halfway into the race.

An Iditarod veteran, Sawatzky was -- like Burmeister -- behind a team in training. He had all 16 of them with him when Bear, a 3-year-old male, went down and died.

The cause of Bear's death is still under investigation.

The third death also remains under investigation.

That dog, Cupid, was in the team of Chugiak musher Jim Lanier. Unlike Sawatzky and Burmeister, Lanier was trying to maintain a competitive position in the race, though he was not among the frontrunners. He was in 32nd at Galena on the Yukon River.

Having earlier dropped three tired dogs along the trail, he said in Galena he was concerned about two others -- Cripple and Ophir -- who seemed to be lagging.

Lanier parked his team behind a huge snowbank to shield his dogs from the wind. He took booties off their feet and tended to their care. He paid special attention to Cripple and Ophir, dogs named for Iditarod checkpoints.

After feeding all the dogs, he went into the checkpoint for some spaghetti. He called his wife and chatted with her for about 15 minutes, saying "I miss you, honey. Everything is OK. The dogs are tired, but they'll be fine. We've got a long way to go yet. I love you."

He told a checker to wake him up at 7:15 p.m., and then consulted with a couple veterinarians before grabbing a nap. When Lanier got up, he decided to leave Cripple and Ophir in Galena to be flown home to Chugiak.

Cupid remained in the team for the run down the frozen, snow-covered river to Kaltag. She never made it there.

With Lanier in Galena was Dr. Robert Bundtzen of Anchorage, who also was worried about a dog named Donald. Donald had been left in the care of veterinarians in Ruby, about 50 miles back down the trail, but hours later Bundtzen was still concerned.

"He just stopped pulling,'' said the 56-year-old physician who specializes in infectious diseases. "He's one of my best pullers too. (Then) he was coughing up blood. Some dogs, when they feel ill, cough food, water and blood. This was just blood. That's when I knew there was a problem."

Bundtzen seemed far more worried about the dog's injuries than his own. A tree branch struck his eye on the way into Cripple earlier in race. When he arrived at Cripple, he had a trickle of blood frozen to the side of his face.

By Galena, about 150 miles farther down the trail, the blood was gone, but the eye was red and puffy. Bundtzen waved off a question about how it was doing.

"I can still see, so it must be OK,'' he said. He seemed far more concerned about Donald.

"We sent him to McGrath, where they have a mini-doggie hospital,'' Bundtzen said. He was hoping to get a report soon from veterinarians on the dog's condition. That was unavailable at press time.

It was in Galena that Bundzten first learned Noah Burmeister had suffered the loss of a dog in his team.

"Oh, my,'' Bundtzen said. "My heart goes out to him and his dog."

Dog deaths this early in the race have been uncommon in recent Iditarods.

The only dog to die last year went down in Elim along the Bering Sea coast, only about 120 miles from the finish line in Nome. That dog was a 2-year-old named Nellie in the team of Doug Swingley from Lincoln, Mont. Nellie, like Yellowknife, suffered aspiration pneumonia, which can kill quickly. Swingley got the dog into Elim fine, and she was quickly flown to Anchorage. But she died anyway.

"She had potential to be a superstar,'' Swingley said at the time. He questioned whether the dog might have been saved with better, faster treatment by the volunteer vets, but it doesn't appear as if it would have made a difference.

The only dog to die in the 2004 race went down just short of the Bering Sea coast. That was 7-year-old Takk, a lead-dog belonging to two-time Iditarod champ Robert Sorlie from Norway.

Sorlie was not in the 2004 Iditarod, but had let friend and teammate Kjetil Backen take Takk to Nome. The dog sat down just before Unalkaleet and died. The cause of death was never reported.

The year before that, there was also one dog death. A 7-year-old male in the team of back-of-the-pack musher Jim Gallea from Montana went down and died between White Mountain and Safety, just outside of Nome.

In 2002, there were two deaths -- a dog that died on the way into Ruby, another that died on the way into White Mountain.

In 2001, there were two -- one near Shageluk and the other early in the race near Niklolai. The latter dog, however, did not die in Nikolai; it died days later in Eagle River. The death was later linked to a strange bacterial infection.

In 2000, the only death came at Elim as one of the last Iditarod entrants was trudging the final miles towards Nome. Iditarod veterinarians were, at the time, thinking they might have seen their first race without a dog death.

Daily News Outdoor editor Craig Medred can be reached at cmedred@adn.comhttp://www.adn.com/id...-7440727c.html