History of Mange in Wombats

Have you ever wondered what mange is and the history of mange treatment? 

In this episode we chat about mange and how it affects wombats. 

We talk to one of our former Directors and founder of Mange Management in Victoria, Jenny Mattingley,  how treatment started in Victoria. We also chat about current efforts and different methods and effectiveness of treatments. 

Thank you for joining us at Wombat Talk.

Want to know more https://www.wombatprotection.org.au/mange-disease

Credits: Wombat Talk is presented by The Wombat Protection Society of Australia’s Chair Amanda Cox and Director Marie Wynan, lover of all things wombats

This episode was produced and edited by Maddi Green 

Guests: Jenny Mattingley, Founder of Mange Management in Victoria.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, I am Marie Wyman. I am Amanda Cox. Welcome to Womba's Talk. Well, good morning, Amanda. Good morning, Marie. Today we're going to talk about the history of mange treatment. Going right back, what do you think?

SPEAKER_02 0:16

That sounds really good. What would you like to know about it?

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Oh gosh, where do we start? Well, Womba Protection Society was founded over 25 years ago for the main purpose of treating manch. But I think that we need to go way back in history. Way back. Way back, really. What do you know about mange treatment full stop? How far can you track it back?

SPEAKER_02 0:42

Well, I understand it's one of the first medical conditions in human beings, and it was actually described in the Bible. That's sort of interesting because Sacoptis scabiae, the mite that causes mange, is a mite that actually affects all sorts of animals. It's just poor old wombats that actually tends to kill. So humans have been trying to deal with this little mite, even on themselves, for a very, very long time. But when it comes to wombats, we certainly know from some of the historical descriptions of the European settlers coming into Australia that they definitely had scabies on their boats and on themselves. And we know that the boat, the naturalists, that took a wombat skin back to I think France back in the very, very early period, that wombat skin has managed. Now, whether the poor wombat that was taken back got it from the boat and from the fact that the sailors, etc., would have would have had lots and lots of mites, we don't know. We don't know the answer to that.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

What do you think it was in Australia like 100 years ago? Do you think there were any landowners out there who attempted to treat wombats? Or do we go 50 years ago? Where where do you think people first recognized what it was and then started to try to treat them?

SPEAKER_02 2:24

Yeah, look, I think the problem in Australia has been that wombats initially weren't protected. And in fact, up to quite late, farmers were compelled to actually remove wombats from their land. So I don't think there was much treatment going on really until wildlife people started to come into the picture and recognized mange was actually developing and wiping out populations of wombats. And I think the earliest ways of dealing with that was trying to use sulfur and oil. And sulfur's always been used as a way of trying to get rid of mites, you know, going back to the boats, they both burn sulfur and wipe the boats down with sulfur, those sorts of things. So sulfur and oil, I think other people have tried things like um eucalyptus oil and orange oil, a variety of these things. And of course, our Aboriginal people talk about a variety of different plants, you know, native plants. And there's numbers of them talking about the fact that certain things like the native penny royal was eaten out by the settlers' cattle. And in their opinion, that was what wombats used to roll in to keep themselves clear of parasites. And so when a lot of those ground dwelling plants that had turbine type qualities to them were eaten out by our stock coming in, that's their opinion of why mange started to affect the wombat population. One of the first things I came across was a wildlife carer by the name of Brian McCarthy. And he, using a Milo tin, had made up a little device to hang over the burrow that had sulfur and oil in it. And when I asked him how much sulfur and oil needed to get onto the wombat, Brian's response was, When your eyes slide off the oily wombat, it's had enough of a dose, which I found very, very funny.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

How successful do you think he was?

SPEAKER_02 4:46

Well, the wombat that he was showing me was a female with a Joey, and we were sitting across um a dry riverbank watching the wombat on the other side where the burrow was, and he had his little device hung up. And he had said that this wombat, we would call it these days, had severe mange. And when I went and had a look and the wombat came out, I would say it was pretty much mange-free, as was its Joey. So the other thing that we used to do was sort of run around with a container of sulfur and oil and a rag on a stick and try and you know rub that onto wombats, which has led to some very funny encounters. But it did seem to be successful. But the problem was, as it is still today, that the wombats sometimes disappear before you get a chance to fully finish that treatment. So Brian's device over a burrow, I thought, was a very clever thing to do because instead of having to chase around a wombat with a bucket of sulfur and oil and a stick and a rag, you had a container that slurped a bit of sulfur and oil onto them every time they went in and out of their burrow. I at that time was a member of a group in New South Wales called Wires, and they had made as their policy that the wombats with mange needed to be euthanased, they couldn't be treated. So I spoke to some of the people who were involved in wires at that time, um, particularly Helen George and Gaeline Parker, and they reckoned that they had tried to import from New Zealand, I believe it was, ivermectin. And now ivermectin is a microcyclic lactone. And at that time it was a fairly new product and was only available by injection. And Galen and uh Helen said to me that although they managed to get some of this into Australia, they didn't believe it it worked. So we had an issue there.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Why do you think that uh Helen George and Gayline Parker didn't believe it was working with injectable ivamectin?

SPEAKER_02 7:12

I think because it was a very new product, they were possibly using the minimum amount and only giving one injection.

SPEAKER_00 7:21

Right.

SPEAKER_02 7:22

And I think that's why, because they were then pretty much the people um being the authority on one that's in wires in those days, that that whole organization decided that mange couldn't be treated. Yep. So you can kind of understand how that happened. Not long after ivermectin had been approved, another product, which was moxidectin, um, had been approved as a poron. So I talked to my uh lovely then local vet, Graham Hunt, who's now no longer with us, and asked him whether he felt the poron, moxidectin would be safe for use on wombats. He felt it would be totally safe, and so I felt a little bit confident to go, well, let's try this pour on. And we may have to use it a little bit more frequently instead of just one treatment. We may have to do it over a number of different treatments. In those days, it said it would potentially last up to 30 days in cattle and red deer. So I thought looking at Brian's Milo tin device, it might be time to move to something we now all call a burrow flap, which was basically a square of plywood hung in front of the burrow with a little cap in it to put in the moxidectin pore on. In those days it was um a proprietary product known as cidectin. So that's how these big plywood burrow flaps got initially created. And what we were able to at least show with that was the concept that wombats will learn to go in and out of the burrow with a burrow flap on it. Uh, they also pull down a lot of those burrow flaps, and over the years, the burrow flaps have become lighter, um, thinner, a whole range of things for a long time. Ice cream lids were used. Um, nowadays we tend to use some form of clear um plastic or even um mesh. That's the history of how the burrow flap method of delivering moxidectin onto wombats came into being. What we've found over years and years now of watching and looking was that the amount of moxidectin needed to treat wombats was significantly higher.

SPEAKER_00 10:07

The syringe pole, Amanda. I know that you very early on uh attempted a syringe pulse.

SPEAKER_02 10:15

Yes, yeah. And so that's um was literally putting a syringe without a needle with the correct dose of um moxidectin in it onto a pole, and then you used another little pole to push the syringe down. The benefit of that would be that you could, if you didn't know where the wombat's burrow was and you couldn't hang up a flap, you could sneak up and use this pole method to squirt the moxidectin substance on. And I believe you improved on that method. Do you want to tell me about that?

SPEAKER_00 10:54

Well, yeah, yes. Well, I thought there was a it was difficult to hit that plunger with that second stick to do it, it wasn't practical. I was searching the player house and shared for something, not knowing exactly what. And as I was putting a lot of washing on, and there it was, the laundry scoop. So, of course, with the perfect handle, and so Ray, my husband, duct taped it onto the pole, and we had a pollen scoop. So from then on, we could only buy washing powder that had that specific scoop with a long handle on. All other powders and liquids for laundry was banned.

SPEAKER_02 11:35

So they're the they're the two methods that are now used as approved application um methods for moxitect and pore on, and that's nowadays they're known as burrow flap or pole and scoop.

SPEAKER_00 11:50

Also, in those early days, the problem too, because Facebook social media didn't exist. So you were publishing bulletins to get the information out.

SPEAKER_02 12:02

What happened was because the wildlife group I belonged to at that time had the policy that you had to euthanase, I left the group and set up with a few like-minded people, the Wombat Protection Society of Australia. And all our original bulletins were very specifically focused on mange. Yeah. What we can do, what people are doing, what works, what doesn't, how to start to get the message out. But this is a major problem for wombats. In fact, one of them really early bulletins had a modified myilo tin, and I made another one using uh a plastic fruit jar that did the same things. Another one is um how how to make these syringes filled up. Um, and for whatever reason, they didn't seem to have syringe caps back then. So we started dipping the tip of the syringe into latex so we could send it out as a kit to people who wanted to help treat wombats because that's what happened as soon as the society started. We ended up getting calls from people saying, Oh, I've got a wombat with mange on my place, I'd love to love to help it. Now, the only problem is sedict in a syringe with a bit of latex doesn't seal very well. So it's almost taken the you know, 25 years that it's been for anyone who ever had one of those kits in their car to get the smell of sedectin out of their blood box or wherever they had it. There's a big history about you know how how things have developed, um proper decaying methods, proper storage and sending methods. Um so it's it's been a been a long learning curve.

SPEAKER_00 13:57

So people treated with sulfone oil and eucalyptus oil and orange oil. When did somebody first start to research mange and mange treatment?

SPEAKER_02 14:10

Well, people like R.W. Martin in the Australian Vet Journal back in 1998, talked about manging wombats. And then Lee Skerrett, who was a PhD student, advanced that work. He was also infesting them with mange mites during his PhD, which is probably slightly different in terms of how mites breed normally on a wild wombat. But even he found that you needed multiple injections of ivermygdon to clear up cases. And probably his cases these days we would call mild to moderate. That probably was one of the first very concise histories of mange in wombats and potentials for treatment. Though he did go back to the ivermectin injections because he was dealing with captive wombats and he was able to. Yeah, yeah. And that goes on to this day. Um, some of that's really good and some of that's really bad.

SPEAKER_03 16:19

Um dear.

SPEAKER_02 16:21

Oh dear. So, Marie, I'm I'm wondering what happened for you after that conference.

SPEAKER_00 16:27

Yes, it was very good for everybody to get together and um just talk wombats, but um before Balberry, we had figured out that the normal doses for cattle wasn't working on wombats. So we had started to use uh a bit higher doses already then. We went up to 10 mil and then we went up to 20 mil. And one of our first cases where we used higher doses again was an adult male. He had severe mange, he had wounds, he had maggots, he smelt a manage and infection, and he was laying down and didn't even get up when I approached him. So I thought he was going to die that night. Thought the euthanasia was the best option, but at the time, the only thing I had with me was a bottle of sodectin, and of course, I was out in a remote paddock, it was getting dark. So at that time, I made the desperate decision to give him a very large dose of sodectin. The purpose was to kill as many mites as possible, mainly just to protect the other wombats in the area. So uh couldn't find him for nine days, and then my husband and I were setting up a population treatment in that area. I found him standing up drinking water from the creek. All scabs had fallen off, and he looked so much better. He was bright, his eyes were clear. So we continued with a treatment and he ended up making a full recovery. So he ended up being an accidental success case. Then after Auberry, we were still hesitant to use those very large doses. We're talking about the 100 mil doses now, until we had another really difficult case. It was another male, womb, that during the first three and a half years, he was given between 20 and 30 mil doses. And during that time, he was never mange-free and continued to have various degrees of mange. So we were, of course, concerned that the mites were building up resistance to demoxidectin. So after the three and a half years, we gave him between 80 and 100 mil doses per week, every week for 16 continuous weeks. Mange disappeared so quickly. So he spent the following six years mange-free and healthy. He was found with a large swelling on the side of his face. So we captured him and took him to veterinary surgeon Dr. Haralf for assessment and treatment. So he received a full full physical examination and all full blood works. And it could be confirmed that his liver, kidneys, and all other organs were healthy, and his presented teeth issues were unrelated to having had mange or mange treatment.

SPEAKER_02 19:20

Yeah, isn't that amazing? And it's, I think it's those um accidental successes. Exactly, precisely. I think that's been what's led the best dose regime all the way through. The the um bigger doses are the ones that actually kill the mites fast, the one that recovers quicker. And as we go further, we'll talk about how we've come up with what we believe is the most appropriate dose regime. I should also point out that there were people like you and others who used the higher doses, took meticulous records, understood it was working, and still got a lot of negative flack. And that's simply because people failed to understand that wombats are different to the animals that these commercial products are tested on.

SPEAKER_00 20:31

Thank you, Jenny, for joining us.

SPEAKER_02 20:34

So, Jenny, can you tell us your memories of the Aubrey conference and how then you and Reg went on to set up a Victorian treatment program called Mange Management?

SPEAKER_01 20:50

Um, yes, well, it was a long time ago, but at the time I was running a very busy wildlife shelter down here in Victoria, and we were having quite a lot of wombats with mange being reported by members of the public, and realised that there's really no one able to go out and deal with wombat with mange. Um, a busy shelter is usually doesn't have the time. And I was feeling that mange is a specialist sort of treatment, a specialist field. Uh, because it's contagious, you don't want the wombats um mixing with healthy wombats, so they they're not something, it's not something you can bring a wombat into air at a shelter where there are other wildlife.

SPEAKER_02 21:46

When wombats with mange are bought into care, not only is there the whole issue about you know quarantining them so other animals don't get the uh mites, um, but there's also the issue, too, that we've found that many. Cases where they were brought into care, they die from stress, not just the mage. So, where did you go from there? Understanding that there was a problem, you don't really want to bring wombats into care. Where did your next steps go?

SPEAKER_01 22:17

I guess hearing at the conference that mage was being treated in the field, I thought, well, this is something we really need in Victoria.

SPEAKER_02 22:28

And and tell us you you used to make up kits to send out to people, as I understand it.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

That's right. Um well we sort of felt that most landowners or people, no one wants to take ownership of the wombat. And I think that was one of the reasons people were reluctant to do anything. So we thought if we were able to provide kids and give them out to landowners and educate them with how easy it was to set up a burrow flap, that that was a really big step towards you know getting on top of mange or at least being able to try and treat mange.

SPEAKER_02 23:15

And it's very interesting because you achieved the first permit for an off-label use on any Australian native animal for a treatment product. How did you decide that was the way to go?

SPEAKER_01 23:31

Well, we didn't decide it, it was decided for us.

unknown 23:34

Right, right.

SPEAKER_01 23:36

Because by the time we'd done our three years of trialling, it was a it had come to a legal point where I think the Victorian government wanted to wash their hands on it. They didn't want to give us the approval, they wanted to handball it. So they said we had to have APVMA approval to use sidectin because we were using it off label. Well, we were just finding by the time we'd got the approval to run the program that the recommended dose that we were telling people to use wasn't effective. We were getting landowners that were becoming disillusioned and I suppose losing interest in taking part because they weren't, and I mean, my myself probably more so than anyone, because I was the one getting the inquiries and dealing with the landowners and seeing that it wasn't successful, all this energy was going out there, but we were having wombats that we were trying to treat, but they weren't cured.

SPEAKER_02 24:42

If you had to say sort of something about um mange treatment these days, what would you be saying?

SPEAKER_01 24:49

It's frustrating because we now know that we've got a dose rate that is effective and will treat wombats and cure them quickly. But the frustration is that now there's the product um brevecto, which is out there and is being um embraced by lots of people, not really knowing, you know, the any um details about it. They've all jumped on board because it was advertised as a one-off treatment, and everyone thought this is fantastic, this is the way to go. We only have to treat that wombat once and it's cured. Whereas in the past, and even now, we're still having to um apply treatment for you know four of our doses. Um, but it we do now, we do now have the chance to get these doses on because they are more effective doses that we're using and they can be applied more um quickly. So yeah, I just feel frustrated now that it seems like the main treatment is going backwards because brevecto has been shown not to be a one-off treatment. It needs three treatments. It was advertised to be a lot cheaper than treating with sidectin, it's actually going to be a lot more expensive. And the chances are of getting the wombat cured are just about impossible because of the the time between treatments, which is a month. So, and it needing three months. And if they did happen to be able to treat that wombat, say it was maybe in care and they were able to get the treatments onto it, that wombat will have suffered far longer than was necessary.

SPEAKER_02 26:40

Yeah, because our um what we call the um higher dose sedectin uh or moxidectin poron these days can actually be achieved in um or full treatment can be achieved in four weeks. We'll come and talk about it. It's a bit like history repeating itself, though, isn't it? Um, you know, something like that the idea that this new product, which actually has the active ingredient, fluorolana, is going to be the best thing, it's going to solve all the problems, and then we're basically watching the field do what we had to do in um field trials for years and years and years with um Moxidectin. I tend to think the lack of um listening to people who have worked in the field, like you, Jenny said for years. These amounts are too small, they're not effective. I'm getting case after case after case where people have tried to put this small amount on and it's not effective. And that's one of our big issues that will go in. We believe that that is far more likely to build up resistance to treatment in the mites than an appropriate dose done well and done quickly that actually kills off all the living mites and the nymphs, and then has some follow-up doses to make sure that the eggs as they hatch also aren't able to develop.

SPEAKER_00 28:09

It's like everybody's reinventing the wheels over and over, and it's like everybody taking their own pathway. Every group out there is doing their own project or their own treatment, and then they're figuring out this isn't working. I feel incredible sadness that who is the one who's suffering. Take aside all the disagreements. It is the wombats who suffer, these wombats that you see being treated like we had the other day, two cases where bravecta had been used, two doses of bravecta, five months later, they've still got mange. They're still suffering.

SPEAKER_02 28:44

I think what's happened is that a lot of researchers have sort of taken this on as their reason for being, um, and you know, done a lot of publish or perish and a lot of a lot of information sort of shot out to the field. I think you were right at the beginning, Jenny, when you said, Oh, they were hoping that Drevetdo Fluorana would be this one-off treatment, because that's what it's advertised for in dogs. But there's also been problems, like because it should be put on by holding the animal, parting the fur, squirting it on. Um, people have come up with these various other ways of mixing it with substances. Now, the problem with that is we know, having worked with the APVMA for many, many years, that you you're not allowed to do things like that unless they approve it. And it's very specific now on permits about how you can apply and how much you can apply. And one of the things you have to do is keep working with those authorities to ensure that what you're doing is is safe and is legal. But of course, you know, people are looking for a quick fix, and the um the hope of a one-off treatment um has made a lot of people jump in. Um, unfortunately, the case studies we've been seeing sent through show that definitely um the mange mite is not removed from the wombat with a one-off treatment, and even in some of the ones where we're seeing two and three, we would still classify that wombat as still having moderate mage. So it will be interesting to see how all of that moves on and develops. And yes, of course, it's frustrating because we know um, with the short treatment um that we've been able to be using, absolutely just fantastic results. And again, it's the problem where field people, people who actually know the wombats, have treated wombats, they're not properly listened to. And on the occasions where they are, then often some of the things that they've said are misinterpreted.

SPEAKER_00 31:05

Unfortunately, social media had a big part to play in all this. There were a lot of new groups coming on, a lot of new people came on board. There was a division happening.

SPEAKER_02 31:16

And we we suddenly had a whole lot of self-proclaimed experts who had not actually done field work, um, and many of them who still are self-proclaimed experts don't do field work. So they're not really following up on what's happening.

SPEAKER_00 31:34

That is so very true. And so many people believe that they have treated a wombat successfully after only one dose of brave to because they can see an improvement in that wombat. But an improvement is, of course, not a full treatment. And if you have surviving mites, the mange will return. I think we should also add that Wombat Protection Society received a APVMA permit, which is Australia Pesticide Veterinary Veterinary Medicine Authority, uh, two years ago to use sidectin or moxidectin, four mil per kilo, up to 80 to 100 mil per dose for five doses five to seven days apart. So we've been doing that for two years now. To be able to renew the permit, we felt we needed to do the pharmacokinetics for moxidectin in BNOS bombats. We have done that now. So the next episode we will be talking about the research we did and the results that came out of that.

SPEAKER_02 32:43

Oh well, look, thank you for that, Marie. And thank you, Jenny Mattingley, our guest today on this episode concerning the history of mange treatment. Of course, history is an ongoing event.

SPEAKER_00 32:58

And that is it for this time. And now over to the Bombats who will have the last say.