A Guide for Pet Owners About Heart Worm Treatments
A Guide for Pet Owners About Heart Worm Treatments
Treatment of animal disease may not be an easy task. For one, not all animals are being watched for or looked after 24/7. Most animals just stay in the back yard or in animal cages especially those domestic pets that we own in our homes so that they would not mess up with so much dirt from the streets. And since most animals just stay outside the homes, the probability of acquiring disease will certainly be high. Aside from this, other factors such as other insect carrier of disease may just be flying near your pets' home. These instances pet owners may find hard to solve since pets normally stay outside. Diseases therefore may easily be passed on as they are most likely to be exposed with other carrying agents.
One of the diseases is heartworm disease. This disease when diagnosed should be treated after the symptoms are observed. Pets undergo an evaluation from the veterinarian to check the degree of infection in the host's body a kind of treatment is done. Certainly, the health condition of the pet is examined. It is highly advisable therefore that when your veterinarian recommends a certain preventive and treatment to your dog, an immediate response must be executed on your part or else the life of your dog will be at risk. Below are the treatments that may be done to a pet dog once the owner sees the symptoms of heartworm disease:
First is treatment of heartworms called adulticide through arsenic-based compound to treat adult worms in the body of the host. A toxic drug indeed, therefore it may introduce certain complications to the host's body systems.
Second is the microfilariae treatment or the egg treatment is done to kill the presence of egg heartworms in the blood since this may be transmitted to another host through mosquito bites.
Third is the administration of post-adulticide. This is highly suggested to make sure that the adult worms are dead. A test is done to make sure that there are no living adult worms that survive. If there's none, then it can be announced that the adulticide treatment was successful. Meanwhile, dogs that may still have adult worms' in its system need to undergo the same first adulticide treatment to totally flush and kill the worms. Lastly, the dog should rest and must be monitored for at least 8 hours. This is vital since the complications may result to weakening of the dog's body organs leading to its expiration.
Heartworm Disease or Dirofilaria immitis is carried by mosquitoes that ingested microfilariae from the blood of an infected host that they bit. These microfilariae or eggs grow and become larvae which stays in the mouth of the mosquitoes. The larvae leaves the mouth of the mosquito when the mosquito bites another animal and these larvae will then enter the skin and muscle connective tissues where they go to reach the right side of the heart and mature in that specific part until they become adult heartworms. How they go to the heart from the skin and muscles is not known.