Protecting Your Pet From Pesky Parasites

Protecting Your Pet From Pesky Parasites

Protect your beloved pet from harmful Parasites 

           One of our goals at Harvey Animal Hospital is to keep your pet parasite free and as healthy as possible.Some of the parasites that affect dogs and cats can cause disease in people as well so keeping your pet as parasite free as possible will keep your family protected too.

Fleas and Ticks 

External Parasites
Fleas are usually easily detected. Most of the time you will see them or evidence of them. Fleas can make your pet very uncomfortable. They can cause them unbearable itching and many pets are actually allergic to them. Severe infestations can cause hair loss, rash, and sores from repeated scratching.

Tick Sizes at different life stages 

Adult ticks are easy to find when they get large after taking a blood meal.  But the nymph life stage of ticks is extremely small and can be very difficult to see on your pet. They are usually the size of a fleck of pepper or a poppy-seed even after they take their blood meal and spread harmful disease. For more information on tick borne diseases and prevalence maps please visit https://www.capcvet.org 


Internal Parasites
Internal Parasites are more difficult to find and diagnose. Heartworms are spread through the bite of a mosquito and require blood testing to find. When we find Heartworms in dogs they have been infected for 6 months already and can be devastating. Keeping them on a monthly heartworm prevention is easy and much less expensive than treatment of adult worms. Treatment of adult heartworms involves several injections that are painful and hard on the dog. Unfortunately, adult heartworms can infect cats as well but its much more difficult to diagnose and treat. There isn’t treatment for the adult worms in cats so keeping them on prevention is even more important.

Healthy Heart V.s A Heart Infected with Heartworm 

The test that we do to detect heartworms in dogs also looks for diseases that that can be spread by ticks. Lyme disease is one of them but there are several others that ticks can spread as well. Erhlichia and Anaplasma are spread by the Brown Dog Tick that is prevalent in our area, even more common than the Deer Tick that spreads Lyme disease.

Intestinal parasites are detected in a stool sample. When we are looking for intestinal parasites we are actually finding eggs that the parasites are laying. Some of the parasites we look for won’t shed eggs right away and some of them only shed eggs intermittently. This can make it even more difficult to find them so we can treat them appropriately. We have a new test that we are starting to run that can find the adult worms prior to them starting to lay eggs. We won’t need anything more from you than the stool sample you already bring for us to check. This new test can detect parasites 1-3 weeks sooner than just the fecal floatation that we have been doing.

Hookworm Eggs detected on a fecal floatation test

Prevention

Prevention of these parasites can be done with either a topical liquid or an oral chew. Most of these products need to be done monthly but there are some newer products that will protect longer than that. Talk to your veterinarian on which is the right choice for your pet. You can now order your preventative medication right online though our personal online pharmacy! Its fast, secure, and the products are guaranteed! Visit https://harveyanimalhospital.vetsfirstchoice.com/

Our goal is to keep you and your pet healthy and happy. Keeping your pet parasite free is an easy way to do this.