Successful treatment of acute head and neck dog bite wounds without antibiotics

Dog bites continue to be the most common bite injury in the United States. We previously reported a series of 61 patients with 215 dog bite wounds. Of these, 55 patients had 188 dog bite wounds of the head and neck area which were treated with copious saline pressure irrigation, meticulous wound and wound edge debridement, repeated copious saline pressure irrigation, adequate antibiotic coverage, wound closure, and close postoperative monitoring. A wound infection rate of .53% and a patient infection rate of 1.8% were obtained using this protocol. Our present study uses the same protocol with the exclusion of antibiotic coverage. Our series of 49 patients with 145 head and neck wounds reveals a wound infection rate of 1.4% and a patient infection rate of 4%. This is not statistically significantly different from the outcome of the previous study.