Animals, mostly dogs, are being brought staggering into veterinary hospitals high on pot, a toxic and potentially lethal condition. Sometimes they’re just sleepy, disoriented and unable to control their bladders. Other times they’re vomiting, having seizures or are comatose.

The symptoms “depend on how much they have,” said Dr. Nicholas Davainis, a Sonoma County veterinarian.

Some animals just need to sleep off the effects, but others suffer dangerous symptoms, including extremely slow heart rates and seizures, that require treatment.

Davainis sees as many as 10 cases of canine marijuana toxicity a month. Farther north, the number of cases climbs, coinciding with increased marijuana production.

Veterinarians at Mendocino Animal Hospital usually see two or three cases a week but last Friday alone had three, said Dr. Jennifer Bennett.

The incidents peak in Humboldt County, the heart of marijuana country.

“I see at least one a day,” said Dr. Joe Humble, and it’s not uncommon to get two or three cases a day at his emergency clinic in Eureka.

“we see more cases than anybody in the world, said Humble, who belongs to the Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care Society.

When he told veterinarians at an international convention in Nashville last year how many cases he sees, they wanted to know where he worked. When he told them Humboldt County, they “went wild” with recognition.

“We’re well known up here,” Humble said. “It’s kind of an embarrassment.”

Nearly all of the affected patients are dogs. The poison hot line run by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals received 361 calls in 2011 about animals ingesting marijuana. Ninety-six percent of those involved dogs.

“Cats don’t tend to eat indiscriminately like dogs do,” said Bennett, although she has treated a few cats with suspected marijuana toxicity.

“We’ve got a dog here who’s eaten laundry. They eat anything that seems interesting to them,” she said. Dogs will ingest a variety of forms of marijuana. They’ll eat the plants, dried marijuana, joints and food made with pot, Bennett said.

The items they eat can become even more unusual when they get pot-induced munchies, Humble said.

He recalled a dog that was brought to his clinic, limp and unresponsive.

“The dog’s mouth was jammed” with baking soda, Humble said. The owner thought that’s what was making the dog sick, but it turned out it first had eaten a bag of marijuana-laced cookies. Marijuana food products can pose particular problems because they taste good and contain concentrated amounts of pot.

The dog’s heart rate was in the 30s, dangerously low, Humble said. The normal range is 60 to 160, depending on the size of the dog.

Animals with marijuana toxicity also may exhibit very high or very low temperatures, Davainis said.

Treatments vary with the symptoms. They include induced vomiting, administering activated charcoal to bind the toxins, intravenous fluids and anti-seizure medication. Humble is experimenting with a therapy that binds lipid-soluble toxins.

Animals find pot to eat in a variety of places. They may find discarded marijuana while on a walk, at a neighbor’s house or in an ashtray in their homes.

“some people are a little cagey,” with their explanations,” Davainis said. “It’s always the neighbor and the roommate,” whose pot was devoured. “we don’t ask too much.”

Owners also have been known to administer medicinal marijuana to their pets, erroneously believing that what alleviates their ailments will help their pets.

While marijuana toxicity in pets occurs in other places, it’s more common in California, the doctors say.

“I went to veterinary school in Wisconsin. we never saw it,” Bennett said. “Here, it’s common.”

You can reach Staff Writer Glenda Anderson at 462-6473 or Glenda.anderson@pressdemocrat.com.

It’s an old dilemma in youth sports, one that has frequently pitted player against trainer, coach against doctor, parent against school. but Heather Campbell doesn’t have to rely on gut feeling and teen self-evaluations, or even her substantial experience in the field. in this case, the trainer simply got out her smart phone, logged on to the web-based testing platform to which Casa Grande subscribes, and scrolled through the results of a cognitive test the player had taken that day.

“Everything was at baseline, and he was good to go,” Campbell said.

Casa Grande is one of the few high schools in the area to have a certified athletic trainer on staff, and is believed to be the only one in Sonoma County to use the Concussion Vital Signs system. It’s one of the latest tools in the treatment of head trauma, an injury that in recent years has been linked to everything from Alzheimer’s and dementia to depression, Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s Disease when occurring repeatedly.

For $375 a year, Casa has access to virtually unlimited pre- and post-injury testing. Here’s how it works, in a nutshell: Under Campbell’s supervision, every Gaucho playing a contact sport — football, soccer, basketball and wrestling are mandatory; volleyball, softball and baseball are optional — logs on to the Concussion Vital Signs website and takes a series of tests that measure memory, concentration and problem solving in various ways.

In one segment, the program randomly generates 15 words and flashes them on the screen, one by one; the participant then has to identify those words nested among 15 new words. another section records how many times an athlete can tap the Space bar with his or her right index finger in 10 seconds. in another, the participant must quickly compare one geometric object with two others. It might be, for example, a red square up high, and a red circle and a blue square down below, and the program will direct the participant to match either the color or the shape. Responses are measured by the millisecond.

The entire test takes 45 minutes to an hour, and it is undeniably tedious. Campbell had one football player fall asleep while tapping.

But the effort breeds a valuable result. once Campbell has baseline results for each athlete, she can test someone after an injury and get an objective read on how impaired they are.

Campbell, who also teaches PE and sports medicine at Casa Grande, receives no extra pay for administering the concussion program, though she has spent many hours setting it up.

She emphasizes that she is not qualified to diagnose concussions. that must be done by a physician. but her testing is an important tool at the doctor’s disposal — both in diagnosing and in deciding when the symptoms have subsided enough to allow re-entry. Campbell will usually retest 24 hours after the initial injury, and then a couple days later, and if the post-injury measurements are more than 5 percent off the baseline, that student probably isn’t going to see the field.

“It gives us one more thing to say, ‘this is where you are. this is what needs to happen,’” Campbell said.

During any game at Casa Grande, it is Campbell or her cohort, retired paramedic Chuck Gant, who decides when a player — visiting team included — is at risk to continue. She will shine a light at the athlete’s pupils and ask a few standard questions: Where are you now? who are you playing? What’s the score? Then she might administer a balance test, counting the player’s mistakes as he stands with his feet together, on one (non-dominant) foot, and with one foot behind the other. those balance tests have been baselined as well for Casa Grande students.

The on-the-spot tests are the best Campbell can do in the heat of competition, but they aren’t comprehensive enough to guide long-term treatment. and athletes’ self-evaluations are notoriously unreliable, because many of them will do practically anything to prove their toughness and get back on the field.

The data-driven evaluations are better for everybody. Campbell, the Casa Grande coaches and the kids’ families can be more confident in allowing the athletes to play, and the school district can minimize its liability.

“I’m lucky,” Campbell said. “The coaches are 100 percent behind me, and I’ve never had a parent say anything about it — just ‘we’re glad you’re here.’”

Students aren’t always thrilled when they have to sit out, but that’s part of the new reality of concussion management. as Campbell tells them: “I’m doing this not so I can pull you from the field, but so I can get you back faster.”

The Concussion Vital Signs program got a late start at Casa this year. Overseeing 15 to 20 kids at a time in the computer lab, Campbell was able to get nearly every football player tested before the Gauchos’ first game. but she didn’t complete the boys’ soccer baselines until the third week of the season, and girls’ soccer wasn’t done until the midway point. The program has helped identify at least three football players and two boys’ soccer players with concussions.

Campbell should be on better footing for basketball and wrestling. Next summer, she hopes to have every football player tested before they put pads on.

A former basketball standout at Petaluma (her father, Ed Iacopi, was a long-time coach at Casa Grande), Campbell would like to see the web-based program expanded to other high schools. Of course, it would help if other campuses had certified athletic trainers.

She takes so much off my plate,” Gauchos football coach Trent Herzog said. “when it comes to injuries and preventing injuries, I don’t even worry about that. … before the Petaluma game, I happened to see their head coach. It’s 45 minutes before kickoff, and he is taping players. I’ve never had to worry about taping ankles. I’m focused on my game plan.”

The Casa coaches coach, the players play and the doctors diagnose. and Heather Campbell and her concussion-monitoring program make it a little easier for all of them.

FOREST RANCH — A little girl diagnosed with a condition that has a big name is facing a liver transplant hopefully within the next few weeks, and her family could use some financial help with the costs.

Morgan Passalacqua, 2 1/2 years, has been diagnosed with progressive familial intrahepatic cholestasis type 1, a liver condition that she has had since she was born.

Morgan is the daughter of Stacey and Bill Passalacqua of Forest Ranch, and the family was told this week by her doctor at Stanford Medical Center that the operation could be as close as a couple of weeks.

“I’m so happy that my baby will get some relief,” wrote Stacey Passalacqua in an e-mail to the Enterprise-Record on Tuesday. Morgan’s mother is a Chico native and is a registered nurse working in Enloe Medical Center’s quality department.

Morgan’s father is a retired sheriff from Sonoma County and is a security consultant.

Morgan has been listed on the United Network for Organ Sharing and has been waiting for a donor. although she was born looking “pink” and healthy, by the time she was three months old, her skin had turned very yellow and her parents had to rush her to UC Davis for testing.

At the time, she was diagnosed with small bile ducts in her liver and started on medications to help with her symptoms. One of her severe symptoms, caused by the back up of bile into her system, is puritis or itching.

Her mother reports that Morgan’s itching causes her to scratch herself until she bleeds. Because of it, she requires 24-hour care to keep from hurting herself. She has been treated at Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital for two years.

Progressive familial intrahepatic cholestasis type 1 means that patients cannot properly move the bile from their liver cells. that condition leads to liver damage, and eventually to liver transplant. it causes other problems, including slowed growth. Morgan, at 21 pounds, is about the size of an 18-month-old child. her favorite thing is Tinkerbell and “everything is pink,” her mother said.

Although Stacey Passalacqua’s insurance will cover some of Morgan’s treatment, a transplant can cost more than $1 million and there are years of other medical bills as well as the chance that Morgan’s body may reject the new liver.

A Morgan Passalacqua fund has been set up through Wells Fargo Bank, and donations may be made out to Morgan Passalacqua and sent to P.O. Box 1744, Chico, CA 95927.

Laurie Kavenaugh can be reached at 896-7765 or lifestyle@chicoer.com.