Heartworm In Dogs
Dealing With Heartworm in Dogs
heartworms in dogs
Every dog owner has heard the word heartworm. But even though it’s easily preventable, some 200,000 or more dogs become infected in the United States each year. Once infection occurs, your dogs health is at serious risk-both from the heartworm itself and from the treatments that are available. The treatments are harsh and expensive, but without them your dog is facing disability and an early death.
First a few facts about the disease. Without going into the complicated details about this nasty parasite, all you really need to know is that heartworm is transmitted to dogs by mosquitoes. The bug bites an infected dog and then becomes a carrier, and transmits the disease to a new dog with a second bite.
Preventing a mosquito bite on a dog would be quite a feat. But that’s OK because there are easily administered medications designed for heartworm prevention that you should be giving your dog. Heartgard is probably the most famous-is a chewy treat that you give your dog once a month to prevent the disease from developing. The good news about Heartgard is that dogs like it, so they think you’re giving them a treat when you’re really sneaking in a prescription medicine. Dogs tend to snap them up. Don’t you wish all doggie medicine was that simple?
When your vet decides to put your dog on preventative, a heartworm test is going to be administered to make sure your dog doesn’t already have an infection. If the test comes back positive, that is very bad news.
First the facts about what heartworm disease can do. The adult worms live in the arteries and heart of your dog. As if bad cholesterol wasn’t bad enough, try to imagine what having a mass of a couple of hundred worms in your heart might do. Over time, if left untreated, your dog is going to get sick and go downhill. Problems he might face include a serious lack of energy, and congestive heart failure. Premature death is the eventual outcome.
Since you don’t want your dog to spend his remaining days feeling tired and lousy, only to face early death from heart problems, if your dog tests positive you’re going to want to go through the treatment. Its a necessary evil when it comes to saving your dogs life, but heartworm treatment is quite grueling. First of all the medicine isn’t something you’d give your grandmother. An arsenic based compound is used to kill the worms. The problem is, when you kill the worms their bodies break up into little pieces. These worm chunks go flowing about in the circulatory system until natural processes in your dogs body break them down. This takes time, and when its all over, your dog will be healthy and good as new.
But in the meantime, if your dog gets too active while the pieces of worm are flowing about in his blood vessels, sudden death could result. This is because the worms can get stuck in the blood vessels of the lungs causing something called an “embolism”. To prevent it, your dog must be kept as quiet as possible. That means he has to stay in a crate or small room 24 hours a day 7 days a week, with the exception of some bathroom breaks. Under no circumstances can the dog be allowed to run or play. The worst thing about this is that this process takes about 5-7 weeks to complete. Its a pretty stressful experience.
Those are the facts about heartworm you need to know. Prevention is easy, treatment is hard but will save your dogs life, and letting your dog go untreated means disability followed by certain early death.
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