What does distemper virus do to the dog?
– an overview of distemper symptoms. As mentioned in the opening sentences, distemper is a viral disease that causes neurological signs, vomiting, diarrhea, pneumonia and respiratory signs, skin lesions, inappetence, fever, lethargy, depression and severe illness in dogs and ferrets afflicted with it. Occasionally, it even causes eye and bone disease. The following discussion is mostly for those of you who are interested in how the virus works in order to infect these organs and create these distemper symptoms. Understanding how the virus works is useful because it aids your understanding of why symptoms occur; how the disease is spread; what treatments are available and why the mortality is so high. 4a. How a distemper virus infects and damages a cell: A distemper virus is a tiny organism (much smaller than a bacteria) which is made up of a protein shell or capsule (called a capsid) entwined around and protecting a strand of RNA (not DNA). The whole complex (RNA sequence plus its prot
