Dog With Drainage

My mother has an eleven year old spayed female lab pitt mix. The dog has developed sores/wounds on her legs. She is prone to allergies so that is what they believe the skin irritations are from. She likes to bite/scratch the area, which made them worse. This has been going on since December. She has been on an oral antibiotic for 8 days. The wounds are cleaned and bandaged daily. She has been going to the vet. There is a black discharge coming from wound. That is what is in the pictures. It smells horrible like old fritos. Please advise. Thank you.    

https://snipboard.io/yPNHM7.jpg

A foul-smelling black discharge usually suggests infection or dead tissue, sometimes from an abscess or a wound that isn’t draining properly. If it hasn’t improved after 8 days of antibiotics, the dog likely needs a recheck ASAP, possibly a culture, different antibiotics, or surgical cleaning/drain placement. An e-collar is also important to stop licking and doodle baseball scratching. This doesn’t sound like something that will resolve on its own.

Hello and thankyou for your question.  I'm afraid that I am unable to access the picture from my phone but I am a little confused by the description.  It is very uncommon in the UK at this time to treat skin damage from simple allergies with systemic (swallowed) antibiotics; usually where they are used, antibacterials would be applied as a wash or a bath to the skin and most importantly, the underlying cause of the itching would be treated alongside it. Possible causes for self-itching  may include pain (some dogs will attack their own skin in response to joint or abdominal pain in a different area of the body) or allergy (which can usually be treated separately in order to stop it continually making the skin itch).  This made me wonder whether there is more going on than I have understood from your description; whether your vet has already isolated a particular unusual bacteria from the area and hence is using an antibiotic to treat it.  Or whether the infection could be obviously from yeast rather than bacteria - but again there's the question of why the antibacterials if that were the case or how the yeast came to invade the skin.   Your vet can / will have ruled yeast in or out by taking a quick sample by microscopic slide from the area.  Another possibility is that there is a draining hair follicle here- there are other ways of treating this - or, a potentially more extreme possibility, whether you live in an area where Alabama Rot, for example, could be a possibility?  - which would be much more serious. . In conclusion then, it sounds as though my thoughts on the treatment depends on my better understanding what is causing the problem.  Your vet would have done some investigation and is likely to know more about this than me at this point, so ought to be able to start explaining to you directly.  Even bacterial infection of the skin usually starts as something else; skin meets bacteria all the time but only rarely would an infection take hold and this is usually when it has been penetrated for some other reason. . I'm afraid that the only thing I can advise is that you return to your vet and find out a) why they think the itching is happening (has pain / allergy been ruled out?) b) whether an infection has been demonstrated and why they think it occured (in the UK it is not common practise to give antibiotics unless it has been) and c) whether treatment for pain or ongoing itching can be given and d) to establish and write down a plan from this point for your own peace of mind.  Wishing you and your uncomfortable dog all the very best!