Keeping Reptiles: The Completely Bonkers Tale of UVB and Reptile Viral Disease
We covered a completely ridiculous video by Liam Sinclair from Reptiles and Research and got met with resistance. We’ve explained why, even if this was true, it would be completely irrelevant. Roman Muryn tried to shovel tinfoil hat conspiracies and had us sit through Dr. John Campbell Videos not at all analogous to a UV lamp. Random people showed up to let us know UVB light once removed bacteria from an iguana. It feels like this will never end.
So why keep the barrage of “punching down” raining on these misguided individuals? Because it is important to eliminate disinformation especially from people that suggest they are evidence based or have done any sort of conclusive evidence while boasting completely crazy claims. Because I keep getting inbox’d with new crackpot theories about how MBD is somehow related to viral diseases. Because it’s time for people to stop and actually address welfare for these animals.
To be clear for anyone that has not been keeping up: I am not advocating that you do not use UV lamps with reptiles. I am very clearly explaining that vitamin D from UVB somehow being any sort of factor in the prevention of viral respiratory disease in captive reptiles because someone believes it also prevents covid19 is harmful disinformation.
The Most Recent News
The vitamin D “research” that Liam Sinclair, et al, attempt to shoehorn into reptile keeping is under heavy scrutiny. Questions of what counts as “deficient” and whether or not only deficient individuals benefit from vitamin D therapies disrupt journals like the Journal for the American Medical Association. These are all questions posited to Liam Sinclair who replied “vitamin D is easy”.
While writing this article an article from The Guardian released Vitamin D supplements may offer no Covid benefits, data suggests in stark contrast to the claims of YouTube “researchers”.
The World Health Organization maintains sunlight as a myth on their covid19 mythbusting page alongside vitamin D.
The latest coverage from Dr. John Campbell, referenced by Roman Muryn, is the usage of Ivermectin — this is an anti-parasitic drug not normally used within a scope of being an antiviral treatment. As a pet owner you’ll most likely recognize this as treatments for fleas, ticks, and mites. Reptiles and Research has not yet released a video suggesting flea collars will protect your reptile from viral respiratory infections — but we’ll certainly be watching for when they do a terrible job mostly plagiarizing that into a reptile related video.
The Original Claim
Taken word for word from the description of the video:
Some of the issues we see in captive snakes are viral infections like respiratory issues or bacterial issues like mouth rot or scale rot. This is most commonly caused by incorrect husbandry conditions. In recent decades, folklore husbandry myths perpetuating a simplistic style of husbandry that does not offer the opportunity for overhead heating and lighting leaves a lot of snakes without a certain beneficial preventative care.
Clearly it begins with “viral infections like respiratory issues” with claims of “folklore husbandry” absent of a UVB light that provides “beneficial preventative care”. This is absolutely not how viruses are introduced to captive animals.
Before someone sends me yet another article about the sun killing viruses — please ask how are the viruses getting into your animal’s enclosure to be killed by a UVB lamp.
Liam has failed to research these viruses and does not understand how these viruses are transmitted: you are the keeper of your captive animal. You control what enters their environment. You practice this through diagnostics, hygiene, and quarantine. There is no scenario where a snake who has gone through the normal rigorous standards required by disease management (part of husbandry) just happens to encounter one of these viruses in its enclosure — regardless of “husbandry” topics Liam attempts to blame them on.
This is already petty and borderline insane. The viruses you would be infecting the snakes with are not viruses the snakes can ever recover from. Deviating from actual husbandry practices including disease management to experiment with “sunshine” to prevent viral respiratory infections is quite literally folklore.
Roman Muryn as Backup
We’re not even going to justify the side trek Roman took into MBD.
The advice from the WHO and NICE has evolved, it will be remembered that they did not, at first, recommend the use of face masks. Yet here we are now a year later with a requirement that everybody entering a government facility should wear a face mask.
This was Roman’s statement supporting Liam’s claims — implying that someday the World Health Organization will say they were wrong about Vitamin D and compares them to masks.
These types of claims are usually paired with “well, it can’t hurt” — which is quite literally folklore medicine. Essential oils don’t hurt, either, and they certainly won’t stop viral respiratory disease even if you compare it to human viruses.
In Romans’ case, unfortunately, this is bordering on a tinfoil hat conspiracy.
Mariah Healey Also Pitch Hitting
Completing our round of disinformation is Mariah Healey of ReptiFiles — known to re-share Liam’s articles with claims of “folklore husbandry permanently injuring reptiles”. Liam and Mariah had enough veterinary expertise to determine injury across an entire squamata but not enough to Google nidovirus.
Both Liam Sinclair and Roman Muryn appear as guest authors on ReptiFiles.
There was no nidovirus coverage at all on ReptiFiles. Through persistence one emerged — one that failed to mention testing and a minuscule 3–6 month quarantine in spite of delivering a ridiculous number of articles to Mariah that can be easily Googled. Try it yourself and please question why no one else could accomplish this feat.
If you visit that page it looks surprisingly like this email, in a chain of emails, trying to convince Mariah that disease is an important topic:
Don’t worry — I didn’t actually want credit for any of that. I only want people to cover this devastating disease with as much fervor as a child writing a book report for school the night before it’s due — much in the same manner these articles and videos are “researched” by our “researchers”.
AHH, Pet Rock, Reptile Lighting
These are Facebook groups that also perpetuate some of the same “facts” as the authors above. In some instances it is correct — but a lamp having any role in prevention of diseases like nidovirus is not only incorrect but it is dangerous.
There is no meaningful “unit” on nidovirus on any of the Facebook groups that have such literature. None of the disease guidance on any of these groups are updated to include any of the information released by researchers on nidovirus. Please prove me wrong.
These are supposed to be groups of researchers, veterinarians, and keepers that all seem to agree that “sunshine” can stop new nidovirus infections because they have not emerged to correct any of these people.
If you know the name of a licensed Doctor of Veterinary Medicine that will tell me that sunshine cures nidovirus — please send them my way.
Animals at Home Network
I love Dillon Perron’s podcast. Please help me save it.
Guests like Zac Loughman, PhD and Dr. Tariq Abou-Zahr MRCVS surely enjoy the UVB “debates” presented by brand new keepers like Liam Sinclair and Mariah Healey but are also able to stress the importance of real diagnostic testing.
Ask Dillon to invite back Dr. Tariq Abou-Zahr and Zac Loughman to ask if vitamin D supplementation, like the experiments being done on humans, has any role in disease prevention practice.
Let Dillon know we want to see disinformation echo-chambers badly cribbing information from unattributed sources booted from the show.
Conclusion
Ask yourself if the information you are consuming is actually correct.
No one in this list was able to identify testing animals more than once, obtaining a history of tests for diseases like nidovirus, or that nidovirus (serpentovirus) was even a disease to be concerned with in regards to ball pythons.
How can they possibly explain how UVB relates to it?
Why do I have to “fight” and spoon feed these people information?
Stop the disinformation.
