Blood pressure (BP) measurement plays a pivotal role in veterinary medicine for diagnosing cardiovascular disorders and monitoring anesthesia of animals. Although indirect BP measurement has been widely applied to monitor BP because of its convenience and non-invasiveness, it is still unclear whether indirect BP measurement is compatible with direct BP measurement in minipigs. In addition, the effect of animal posture during BP measurement is not well understood in minipigs despite its importance to cardiovascular performance. Therefore, both systolic and diastolic arterial BPs in minipigs were measured via femoral artery catheterization for direct BP measurement and using a compressive cuff as an indirect BP measurement under the dorsal or right lateral recumbent postures. Numerical values were processed by the Bland-Altman method to calculate the bias ± SD and the limits of agreement (LOA). In accordance with the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine guidelines, the results between direct and indirect BP measurements were determined as apparent disagreements in both systolic and diastolic arterial BPs under all postures because of large bias ± SD and wide LOA. The results of the present will help prevent misinterpretation of the anesthetized patient's condition during monitoring of BP by indirect measurement.

Getah virus (GETV) infection causes sporadic outbreaks of mild febrile illness in horses and reproductive failure in pigs. In this study, we established a reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) method to detect GETV from suspected virus-infected samples. The reaction conditions were optimized and validated by using RNA extracted from GETV propagated in cell culture. A GETV-specific GED4 primer set was designed and used to amplify a 177 bp DNA fragment from a highly conserved region of the E1 glycoprotein gene in the GETV genome. RT-PCR performed with this primer set revealed high sensitivity and specificity. In the sensitivity test, the GED4 primer set detected GETV RNA at the level of 102.0 TCID50/mL. In the specificity test, the GED4 primer set amplified only a single band of PCR product on the GETV RNA template, without non-specific amplification, and exhibited no crossreactivity with other viral RNAs. These results suggest that this newly established RT-PCR method is useful for accurate identification of GETV infection in animals.

An eighteen months old, female, Great Dane dog which had shown signs of severe cachexia, dehydration, hematuria, vomiting and the palpable cervical mass during three weeks was examined clinically and necropsied after death. Diagnosis of this tumor case was made by gross pathology, cytology of the aspirate, radiography of the abdomen and the tumor tissue as multicentric, histiocytic lymphosarcoma. Cytologic findings of the needle aspirate of the cervical lesion were typical of macrophage origin cell. The tumor was encountered predominantly in the lymph nodes, tonsils and spleen. The predominant cell type of these tumor masses manifested characteristics of histiocytic cells