ScienceDaily (Nov. 26, 2012) — Despite --
or perhaps because of -- their large size, swans seem particularly prone to
injury. Known problems include collisions with cars, lead poisoning due to
gunshot wounds or ingested foreign bodies and injuries from fishing hooks.
Injuries to the birds' hips, however, are believed to be uncommon. Michaela
Gumpenberger and Alexandra Scope of the University of Veterinary Medicine,
Vienna now present evidence to suggest that such injuries are more frequent
than suspected but are under-recorded because of difficulties in diagnosis.
They show that computerized tomography is far better suited to examine the hip
joint than classical radiographic methods.
Their results are published in the journal Avian
Pathology.
Diagnosing an injury in a swan is a far from
easy undertaking. Not only are swans large, frequently weighing over 10 kg, but
they are generally not happy at being handled and thus many of them can only be
examined after sedation, which naturally represents a risk. The hip joints of
many species of bird are known to be vulnerable to injury but swans are believed
to suffer broken hips only rarely. The traditional way of examining the birds'
hips relies on radiography but Gumpenberger and Scope now show that
computerized tomography (CT) gives more reliable findings.
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