I like watching veterinary programs (for instance, “The Incredible Dr. Pol”, “Aloha Vet”, etc.) and one aspect of the surgeries they show puzzles me. Is it normal not to mask while a vet is doing an operation? Most operations I’ve seen on those programs do not involve using a surgical mask.
I realise most animal diseases are not communicable to humans and vice-versa, but I would have thought more precautions would be take anyway. ???
Perhaps it’s because they are filming, and wearing a mask would mean a harder time understanding what they are saying.
I’ve worked in animal rescue and have seen lots of photos of vets doing spay/neuter and they never seem to wear masks. Also, I was onsite volunteering at a large dog rescue facility and got to walk into the surgery room in the middle of a procedure… no mask. Barely sterile, after all we just walked in from outside. We knew not to touch anything, but it was nothing like the sterile conditions I had when I’ve had surgery.
I expect for most places, it represents cost savings, even though surgical masks are pretty cheap. In addition, the evidence that they actually reduce surgical site infections is pretty weak, at least in modern ORs with good ventilation practices. That said, there is international consensus (in the human field) that recommends use of surgical masks at least if standing within 1 metre of the surgical field.
In our hospital, everyone in the OR wears a mask, even though for the anaesthesia team this is probably overkill. We are a veterinary teaching hospital, so we follow “best practice”, and because we are teaching while operating, probably tend to yap a bit more than a surgeon in practice - which increases our risk of fouling the surgical field with droplet spray.
Medical news site which covers the evidence issue (about halfway down)
(see also Mitchell and Hunt 1991 Surgical face masks in modern operating rooms - a costly and unnecessary ritual?, and Tunevall 1991 Postoperative wound infections and surgical face masks: a controlled study)
TLDR: probably doesn’t make a lot of difference, if you are not drooling over your patient.
Good feedback, Udlander. Sometimes on tv they’ll show a surgeon in the middle of a long and harrowing procedure sweating profusely and a nurse occasionally swabbing his forehead. Which makes me wonder about the possibility of sweat dripping onto the patient. Does that ever happen (granted, I know I’m asking if something on tv ever happens IRL, so… grain of salt time.)
My dad was a small animal vet for forty years, and I sometimes assisted him in surgery. He didn’t wear a mask, often because he was talking on the phone headset.
But he was pretty amazing. I remember once assisting with a spay of a pregnant bitch. He was talking on the phone to a client about something completely different, and the hands seemed to go by themselves - clamp/ligate/clip clip clip and then he grabbed the uterus and tossed it, without looking, and it landed exactly in the middle of the slop bucket.
“Dad, did you see what you just did?”
“Oh”, he said, glancing around. “Did I miss?”
“No”, I said, “You hit it right in the middle without even looking.”
“Well”, he said, “this isn’t the first time I’ve done this.”
The Chinese term ‘kung fu’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘martial arts’. It can refer to any kind of physical expertise. When my dad operated, he had major kung fu. I remember him telling me about an operation he did on male cats with chronic urinary blockage. It amounted to a sex change on the cat - amputate the penis, castrate it, and reroute the ureters into the small intestine. He just read about it in his vet journals, practiced a bit on some dead cats and then started doing it, successfully.
My dad was really good at what he did - really, really.
Regards,
Shodan
Thanks for the comments. I guess it isn’t as weird as I thought.
I would think that liability would have something to do with it as well.
If wearing a mask decreases the chance of a complication by a percent, if you are dealing with humans, then that is necessary. If you were not wearing a mask in surgery, and got an infection, you could probably sue for malpractice, and the doc would be on the hook for not following best practices.
Pets and other animals are not nearly as high stakes. Sure, it’d suck if your dog got an infection from surgery, but it’s not nearly the same as if your kid or spouse got an infection.
Neat story overall, thanks.
The snipped part (heh :)) above gave me a chuckle. Every industry has their little bits of amazing or weird or unique that are treated totally nonchalantly by insiders because it’s all just workaday stuff. Ho hum.
Something about “… well, I just grabbed a few dead cats I had lying around and …” that hit me sideways. Doesn’t everybody have a few dead cats lying around that nobody wants? Of *course *they do.
Kung Fu: “…study, learning, or practice that requires patience, energy, and time to complete…”
i.e. Skill learned from dedication and discipline. Utterly appropriate for what you describe.
My late sister, AK Dog Doc, invented a new surgical procedure in the midst of life-saving surgery on a maulled dog - Reconstructing lung cavivity support to replace a few macerated ribs. Whilst undergoing excruciating pain from kidney stones. There is a level of skill and capability that comes after you’ve spent years practicing that looks like magic to an outside. “Gong (kung) Fu” is real.
Aren’t dogs and cats going to have tougher immune systems than humans? One would think you could get away with less clean surgery as a result. Dogs seem to be able to drink dirty water with minimal consequences and cats are infamous for being tough, fast healing little creatures.
Those are digestive immunities.
IANAV, but I doubt they have any special immunity to sepsis.
He contracted with a regular service that came around and picked up the euthanized pets and so on. IIRC they were made into fertilizer. One of my tasks was to bag up and put them into the special bin. I even remember the name - The Old Crow Dead Animal Service. It was run by a friend of my older sister.
And the guy running it was mildly eccentric, but quite well-off. It was my first introduction to the concept of “if you want to make money, find a job that is in demand but nobody either thought of, or wants to do”. He reminded me of Jeff the knacker man in the James Herriot books. He was a pleasant, personable guy who spent his days hauling dead rotting carcasses about. He also had a contract with the state to pick up deer and other large-size road kill. He was in his forties, and once mentioned to me (he would talk your ear off if given a chance) that he had been married to the same woman since he was sixteen. She wasn’t pregnant, they didn’t have to get married - they wanted to get married, so they did.
But yeah, my dad had a lot of unusual stuff lying about, including but not limited to dead cats. He was on the licensing board for his state, and part of the examination was diagnoses. So he was showing the slides of his and my mother’s trip to Hawaii, and right in the middle was a slide of an interesting tumor he had removed from a cat’s eye that he was going to use in his exams. It seemed normal to me - my wife did not find it so.
Regards,
Shodan
Not a vet, either, but I was little brother to one: You are correct.
Ok, overt sepsis, but sepsis is the end stage of an out of control infection. Do healthy cats and dogs normally get to that point if they are given surgery under less than perfectly sterile conditions?
I’m working on a show now about a veterinary practice, and the doctors and techs do wear masks during surgery.
Considering that nothing man-controlled is perfectly sterile… 
Generally-speaking, no.
When I said “less than perfect”, I meant “kind of dirty”. James Heriot’s books are full of stories of fairly invasive procedures performed under literal barnyard conditions. This is to livestock - so if the animal dies from infection, I guess you can just have them turned into sausage - but I would assume most animals survive.
I work at a shelter and also a busy ER/specialty center. Masks are worn for surgical procedures and dentals. The masks are for the animal’s protection during whatever surgery, because yes sepsis is a thing, and they’re worn during dentals with a fluid shield for the eyes for our protection, because oral bacteria in your eye can send you to the hospital.