The utility of social media

Ah, social media. For many, the likes of Facebook, Instagram and (apparently) TikTok have become commonplace in our day-to-day lives.

These apps are designed to trap us in with their enticing notifications and instant gratification model, and they can have a huge number of detrimental effects.

It’s a bit of an odd subject for me to touch on, but given my recent involvement in a drive to collect data on social media, I thought it would be good to explore the various avenues that social media provides us, and discuss some of the positives.

Your online presence

Remember the golden rule and you’ll be grand: anything that goes online, stays online. More and more we see Instagram accounts and Facebook pages popping up with members of the veterinary profession at the helm. These accounts can provide a huge amount of helpful information and CPD, such as case studies and infographics, as well as providing you with links to further content.

I think this is a great use of social media, as it provides readily interpretable content for a variety of learning styles. Social media has provided options for us. CPD is no longer ONLY supplied by didactic lecture theatre content where you have to commit to a whole morning of teaching. You can simply find an account, work through some case scenarios, and that’s 20 to 30 minutes in the bag – you can even ask questions.

One of the major benefits of this approach is the degree of interaction you can get with the content providers; as it is predominantly an ongoing source of information, compared to a single hour lecture, you’ll find that people will respond to your questions in due course.

I can remember during my finals revision, the RVC had an ongoing Twitter session that was led by one of the small animal, farm or equine clinicians. The idea would be that they present some initial information and ask questions, and the storm of tweets would come flying in from keen students.

Funnily enough, it wouldn’t always be the extroverts who spoke up – this avenue of social media provided a way for some of my more introverted colleagues to stand up and speak their minds. Although often it is seen as one of the downsides of social media that people are much, much more confident in their opinions and how they speak to people, it does provide a route for slightly quieter people to get involved.

Data is data

As many of you may know, we’ve recently seen a spike in the number of feline pancytopenia cases. My first involvement with this “outbreak” was at the end of April when I received a referral advice call from a colleague who had seen three cats in the same household that presented for bleeding.

One cat had already died, one had received a whole blood transfusion and one had received a xenotransfusion. The two cats receiving transfusions had been documented to be severely thrombocytopenic, neutropenic and anaemic.

After discussion, we elected to question the owner more on possible intoxications, such as oestrogen toxicity from hormone replacement therapy, and to check vaccination and FIV/FeLV status – that’s about as far as my non-medic brain could go.

Little did I know at the time that we were going to see a substantial increase in the number of these cases presenting. Over the past four weeks, we’ve had at least 10 cats present. They all present with non-specific signs and often with bleeding due to their severe thrombocytopenia.

Unfortunately, at the time of writing it is still unclear as to what the aetiology of this disease process is. Without an obvious inciting pathological cause, we’re stuck as to what to treat. Yes, we can treat for treatable conditions (immune-mediated and infectious disease) and provide supportive care (blood transfusions), but we need to find out what’s causing this issue.

Come on in, social media

I put a post on a relatively well-known veterinary Facebook page, Veterinary Voices UK (the closed discussion group), detailing the current situation and our findings so far. I asked for people to collaborate by commenting on any cases that fit the aforementioned description and to provide information.

This is where I’m proud of our profession, and proud to use social media for good. Within the space of a week, we had been made aware of more than 35 additional cats and managed to collate this data into a spreadsheet for us to assess for commonalities.

Not only did we get some new data, this post also led to the news spreading all over the country and I had contact from various pathologists, the APHA, the Veterinary Poisons Information Service, the Liverpool Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network

(SAVSNET), and a whole host of referral and primary care practices alike.

Social media had spread the message, and it has allowed a huge collaboration of colleagues. Ultimately, people far more intelligent than myself are interrogating the data and having conversations about the pathophysiology of what we’re seeing, but I’d like to think I’ve played my part in utilising social media for good and bringing this working group together.

All too often, primary care practice gets ignored in research. Services like VetCompass (RVC) and Liverpool SAVSNET aim to help bridge this gap, but we’re all scientists at heart, and we can all contribute to ongoing research – social media just provides a good platform for this.

You could make the argument that then this data is open-access and anyone can get hold of it. From my – probably naive – perspective, as soon as someone finds out what’s going on, the better. Open-access data just allows for more collaboration, and I really hope it allows us to find and fix our current feline pancytopenia issue.

How can you help?

The RVC is leading an investigation into these pancytopenic cats. A short summary of the situation can be found at https://rvc.uk.com/survey-feline-pancytopenia and a survey to contribute your own practice data can be found at https://rvc.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/pancytopenia

That’s all folks!

If at any point you have a question, or want to discuss a topic from ECC Endeavours, please feel free to drop me an email at [email protected] and I will try to get back to you ASAP.

Until next time, take care.