Does Your Dog Need A Heartworm Pill
To understand the role of the heartworm pill, it helps to understand honest a exiguous about how heartworm disease is spread. Without getting too technical this is how the heartworm life cycle works.
Adult heartworms congregate in the heart and lungs of an infected lung. Here they grow, and breed, releasing thousands of puny descendants into the animal's bloodstream.
These juveniles cannot develop further inside a canine host. So, they wait reach the surface of the skin, for a mosquito to bite your pet. Then they travel into a mosquito host, where they can acquire further.
Eventually, these larval heartworms need to move on again. This time, they wait for the mosquito to bite another dog (or more rarely a cat) and then travel into the bloodstream of their new host.
Once larval heartworms are passed to your dog, they will grow for around six months before congregating in the organs to breed and start the whole cycle off again.
There is no true method of heartworm prevention, as preventing a mosquito biting with 100% certainty is impossible. Instead, the heartworm pill is based on the idea that mosquito bites are inevitable, and therefore, infection with larval heartworm parasites is also inevitable. The active ingredient in any heartworm pill is safely able to end all larval heartworms that have been inside their animal host for one month or less. So by using a heartworm pill every 30 days, you regularly destroy all the larval parasites in your pet, before they are able to develop into a danger to your dog's health.
To absolutely guarantee your dog never suffers from heartworm disease, a heartworm pill (or equivalent medication) would need to be used every 30 days, from puppy-hood to death. But the risk of catching heartworm disease varies greatly, from region to region and season to season. So while some dog owners use heartworm prevention continually to relish 100% certainty that their dog remains heartworm free, others choose to minimise but not completely eliminate the risk of heartworm disease, by using the heartworm pill on a seasonal basis only.
The best way to find out how prevalent the disease is, in your area is to scream to your vet. They would need to carry out a heartworm test prior to beginning treatment with a heartworm preventative for the first time anyway. So while you're there, find out how many cases of the disease they observe.
Any mosquito that bites your pet could be carrying the parasite, but the chances of it actually doing so are higher in areas with lots of dogs carrying the parasite also. While the threat of the parasite may be low in your area, the only way to eliminate it altogether is to use a heartworm preventative. The more pet owners who do expend the heartworm pill or similar methods of prevention, the fewer host animals there will be for the parasite. This in turn means the overall scale of the problem will begin to drop. At the moment the problem is growing both in terms of numbers and locations affected. By using heartworm pills you can play your part in stopping the disease for future generations of pets.
So, does your dog need the heartworm pill? If you live somewhere with year round mosquito activity, almost certainly, he does need heartworm prevention. But, if you can guarantee your pet will not be bitten by an infected mosquito perhaps you can get away without year round use of heartworm pills. But, it is unlikely anyone will narrate you to take this risk. Though preventing the disease in the first place is straightforward, treating it once established is notoriously difficult, dangerous and expensive. So, even though many dogs might not really need the heartworm pill, they are given it, just to be on the safe side. It is a simple way to prevent any unexpected veterinary bills or stress for your pet.
For more information about heartworm pills and topical heartworm medicine, or to buy discount heartworm medicine for dogs or cats visit the links.
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Filed under Generic Heartworm Medicine by on Oct 23rd, 2011. 