Heartworm Disease in Your Dog, Let’s Prevent It!
Heartworm disease is a deadly disease that can affect dogs (and cats) but fortunately it is easy to prevent. With a once monthly oral or topical preventive and yearly monitoring we can help keep your four legged baby safe from this mosquito caused disease. This blog will focus on what heartworms are, what damage they do, and how we can prevent them.
Microfilarias are tiny worms that are spread by the mosquito. These tiny worms are passed from the mosquito into the blood stream of dogs when they are bitten; they then live and grow in the blood stream for up to 30 months. Once they are larger and older (becomes heartworm) they settle in the pulmonary arteries of the heart where they reproduce and send out more microfilaria. Female adult heartworms grow up to 12†long with a life span of 5 years while male heartworms grow up 7†in length. Even though a microfilaria can live in the blood stream for over two years, typically they can pass form the young larval stage (microfilaria) to an adult stage of heartworm (settled in the heart) and start reproducing within 6-8 months. When one dog in your neighborhood has heartworm disease it has the potential to infect all the others with each bite from a mosquito. This makes it all the more important to protect your baby since you do not know if others are protecting theirs.
Heartworm disease does not show clinical symptoms until it has reached a heavy worm burden to cause severe cardiac compromise. The adult worms that have taken up residence in the heart are making the heart work harder to pump blood since the valves and chambers are full of worm and not proper blood flow, this in turn causes enlargement of the heart and poor flow of blood to oxygenate and send nutrients out to the body. Symptoms of cardiac disease can include weight loss, decreased exercise ability, lethargy, poor body condition, coughing, inability to breathe easily, and appearance of abdominal bloating due to fluid build-up. These symptoms do not present until severe disease is present which is why routine (yearly) monitoring and testing is so important.
Year around prevention is recommended to ensure complete protection. Mosquitoes have been found to survive year around living in basements, crawl spaces, and closets. These little pests find their way in in the fall and can survive the winter in warm style. In the cold months of winter our area of the world will frequently have some warm days to tease us with and also to let some bugs (including mosquitoes) live for another day creating potential for infection. Another thing to consider is travel time. If you have traveled during the cold season you may have brought a few bugs home with you in your car or luggage. If your pet traveled with you they were exposed the whole time. Lastly, there have been two different resistant forms of heartworm detected which originated in the south and spread throughout the country when dogs were placed in new homes during the hurricane Katrina disaster. Clearly, the threat is there and we can’t forget that.
Treatment for heartworm disease is very dangerous; it requires multiple injections of an arsenic chemotherapeutic agent into the muscles of the spine that will kill the adult worms living in the heart. If that thought alone isn’t concerning understand that the dead worms then leave the heart and have to pass through the lungs in order to break up and be carried out of the body in the blood stream. If any of you have had or know anyone who has had a pulmonary blood clot this is similar in that the risk of death from passing through the arteries of the heart and into the lungs could be deadly and also compromise lung function (breathing). It really is much safer and more cost effective to give the monthly preventive. We are very fortunate that in this day and age we now have the choice of several safe and effective methods to prevent heartworm disease. We can give chewable oral preventives or topical preventives that include intestinal dewormers and/or flea preventives all in one treatment. What a great idea! Keep your pet safe from heartworm disease and keep the whole family safe by preventing flea infestations and intestinal parasites.
Heartworm disease is a deadly disease that can be easily prevented. Please protect your much loved pet from this horrible disease. Spring is here and so are the mosquitoes, come in and get your preventive today and don’t forget to use it every month!