Welcome to Pet Doctors blog. I’m Dr. Dean Severidt and I’m here to answer some of the questions that you’ve sent in to our website over the last week at petdoctorsofamerica.com, and let’s just get right into the questions. And the topic we’re going to talk about today—we had a lot of questions come in on this—is the topic of heartworms. And if you’re a pet owner, especially a dog owner, I’m sure you’ve heard the term heartworms. If you don’t totally understand that, I’m sure you know what it is and it’s out there and it’s a problem, especially down here in the south.
The first thing that I had for—the first question I had is what causes heartworms. Where does it come from? Why is it here? Well, what causes it is mosquitoes carry it and what happens is an infected mosquito bites the dog or an infected mosquito will bite a dog and if that dog is not on prevention, it will cause that dog to get heartworms. That mosquito actually gets the heartworm from another infected dog. And so, a lot of times you’ll see heartworms in a real small geographic area where one dog is positive, mosquitoes bite that dog and they carry it to all the neighboring dogs. And so all of a sudden, a lot of dogs in one area will develop heartworms.
I’m practicing in Florida and now. I practiced in Iowa for about 20 years before I moved down here, and heartworm is not as big a problem back there, so people would get lax with it and we would see it in little pockets like that. You could take it down to a city block where there’ll be four or five dogs coming in because that mosquito or those groups of mosquitoes found that one infected dog that took it to all these other dogs.
So it’s a disease that’s carried by mosquitoes. It’s not contagious to people. It’s not something we need to worry about but something that your pets definitely need to worry about, and it’s something that we see periodically in cats, so it’s not just a dog disease like most people think. It’s also something that you want to prevent in your cats. So remember that if you’re a cat owner, it’s something you still need to be concerned about, is heartworms.
And another question which we kind of answered but we’d go a little bit more into is how it’s spread. Once again, it’s spread by infected animals, infected dogs or cats, mosquitoes biting them and then those mosquitoes carrying it to another pet. And once again here in Florida, it’s very endemic. When you get down south, you have mosquitoes year round. This stuff just builds up and you see a lot more of them. Like I said on the previous question, I used to practice in Iowa and if we saw one or two cases a year, that was a lot of heartworm in that area. And then, I moved down to Florida and we see one or two a week. I mean, it’s a very, very common problem and something that you all need to be very aware of and be doing something which we’re going to talk about later to prevent this from being a problem with your pets.
Another question that came in to our web at petdoctorsofamerica.com is, “Okay, you talk about heartworms. What do you have to do to keep your dog from getting heartworms or your cat from getting heartworms?” You have to use prevention and there are numerous preventions on the market available. There are pills you can give them. There is liquid you can put on the back of their neck that’s absorbed through the skin that will cause it—some of them are combined with flea products. Some of them are just heartworm products. Some of them treat intestinal parasites as well as heartworms.
There are lots and lots of different products on the market. I’m not here to go over every one of them because that would be a very, very long process, but the product I like the best, the product I recommend at my clinic is a product call Sentinel by Novartis and that’s a product that it’s a pill you give them once a month and that particular pill will prevent heartworms, and it also prevents fleas. And if you saw our blog a couple of weeks ago on fleas, one of the things I said is you’ve got to get to the problem of the flea which is the eggs and the larvae and that’s one of the nice things that Sentinel does. It attacks the flea from the immature stages and so it will totally block that life cycle, but that’s a great prevention.
For cats, I think the best prevention on the market is a product called Revolution and the reason for it is number one, it’s approved for cats. Number two, it’s a liquid that you put on the back of their necks, so it’s very easy to apply. You can give pills to cats but once again, you’ve got to give your pill a cat every month. To me, it’s a lot easier to use the liquid and apply it to their back. And the nice thing about Revolution, it’s a flea prevention also, so you’re combining everything into one product, preventing fleas and preventing heartworms at the same time.
So those are the products we recommend, but there are a lot of products out there and that’s not to say these are necessarily better. It’s just what we’re doing in our clinic.
Another question that came in is, “Can I just wait until my dog gets heartworms and then treat it? I know there’s a treatment for it.” Well, yeah you can but it’s like any disease. You want to prevent it if you can. I mean, you don’t want to wait to get a cold; you want to go ahead and prevent it before you get the cold, so same thing with pets. Obviously, we can prevent diseases and we want to do that. And the problem with heartworms is it’s so variable how it affects the pet that it can be too late by the time you come in.
I’ve had dogs come in to my clinic that people really didn’t know anything was wrong with them. All of a sudden, their dogs started coughing, it wasn’t acting right. We diagnosed heartworms. We went ahead, we took X-rays. We did some blood work. We found out the dog is in renal failure. The dog is in heart failure. All kinds of issues going on that we can’t even treat the pet at that point. I mean, it’s almost untreatable. So certainly not a reason you would want to wait on the preventions and wait until the animal gets it and then treat it because it could be too late. If you catch it early enough, heartworms is very treatable but I will tell you, it’s very, very expensive. When you can prevent it in an animal for $10.00 a month, I don’t think I’d want to look at treating him for maybe $700.00 or $800.00 depending upon the severity of it. It obviously financially makes a lot more sense to put them on prevention. So, you always want to use the preventions and make sure that your pet is covered every month.
And another question we had come in, and this is a good one because I faced this one when I was in Iowa. “If I live in cold weather, do I need to prevent heartworms year round?” Well, the true answer to that is no. In the wintertime obviously there are not even mosquitoes. You’re not going to have heartworms, and that’s kind of what we used to do when I was practicing in Iowa. But what I found which is very, very common is people would stop at about December and then they should start it up again in March or April. Well, they wouldn’t think about it until May. So they’d go an extra month or two without heartworm prevention. They’d risk their pet getting the disease.
So what I recommend now when I’m talking to people in most parts of the country, and I think most veterinarians will say the same thing, is just keep your pet on a year round. It’s a good flea prevention. It will treat intestinal parasites, most of them, and it’s a heartworm prevention. It’s not going to hurt the pet and then you’re not going to forget to do it. If you’re doing something year round every month, you’re not going to forget it. So I think it’s a good idea to just do it year round whatever part of the country you’re in and prevent it.
And once again, there are many, many options for preventions. We use the Sentinel on the dogs, Revolution on the cats, but there are lots of other possibilities. The key is to make sure you have your pet tested, which is the blood test. They’ll draw a little bit of blood. They’ll test it and they’ll tell you yes, he has heartworms or no, they don’t have heartworms. And if they don’t, then get them on a prevention. And then, you want to do the blood test every year to make sure your pet hasn’t picked it up, it didn’t spit the pill out, or the medication for whatever reason didn’t work, so once a year is a good idea to have your pet come in and have it tested. Make sure it’s negative and then keep them on prevention, and prevention is always the best. Always prevent things if you can.
So that kind of sums up some of the questions on heartworm and I thank you for the questions you’ve sent in. I ask you to keep sending your questions in and we will meet every week and try to answer some of them.
Dr. Dean Severidt
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