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SWAB KIT Available from Pam Croft at the AHC of Wales
or SAC CH Shows or
by phone - details below
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The Animal Health Trust UK stores DNA from various breeds for future
research purposes and they have agreed to store DNA of the
Afghan Hound, this can only be for the good of the breed in the
future as samples can be collected from healthy and sick dogs. We would like
to extend our thanks to the AHT for coming up with this amazing offer and we
are well on the way with collecting funds for the
Afghan Hound Health
Fund, an online auction wll be coming soon and please feel free to suggest
any other fundraising events as it appears that the Kennel Club will donate
quite a high percerntage of funds if we can show we are serious in helping
with the funding of DNA health research and start to raise money, and who
knows it may not even too far in the distant future when they can start
working and coming up with specific DNA health tests for afghan hounds
We will ask the payment of £5 a swab kit when this is provided as the AHT
would prefer to have the donations and swab kits returned in bulk, we have
made an intitial order of 40 swab kits but we think they will be in high
demand, if anyone would like to pre-order a swab kit please contact myself
Pam Croft Email:
ahi@sky.com or Telephone 01424 427908 or Muriel Boydell
01424 420595
The AHT are producing a letter on their headed notepaper detailing
everything which we will make available to anyone who would like to see a
copy and obviously details given would be confidential, if you need any more
information please feel free to contact me
Below quote from Cathryn Mellersh PhD
Dear Pam,
We do store DNA from various breeds now, for future research purposes, and
we would be happy to do that for the Afghan Hound.
We can store DNA collected either as blood samples (collected fom UK dogs
only when the dog is having blood drawn for a veterinary purpose) or from
cheek swabs. The amount of DNA we can extract from cheek swabs is usually
sufficient for our purposes, providing owners follow the instructions we
provide.
We can provide cheek swab kits - these include 4 cheek swabs, full
instructions an a submission form that each owner must sign giving the AHT
permission to use the sample in future research. The submission form
details the information we need to collect for each dog sampled. Brief
details will be asked on the form or any current conditions
Because we currently do not have any funds in place to cover our costs we
would ask for a donation of £5 per swab kit. We can supply swab kits to
individuals, or (our prefernce) to a willing volunteer from the Afghan
community who would be happy to give out the kits. The AHI have volunteered
and been accepted as the point of contact for co-ordinating the supply and
return of the supply kits to the AHT
Upon receipt of each sample we will log the details of each dog into our
database, and will store the DNA in our freezers.
Each quarter, upon request, I will provide a brief progress report, in terms
of the number of samples we have received and any research being carried, to
anybody who requests a copy.
If, at any time in the future, we were in a position to initiate a research
project using the samples we had collected we would need to seek additional
funds to cover that research - the £5 donation requested for each swab kit
covers only the logging of sample details and the sample storage.
Best wishes
Cathryn
Cathryn Mellersh PhD
Canine Genetics Research Group Leader
Animal Health Trust
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