Ever wonder why you have to give your dog heartworm protection every month, or wonder why we test your dog for heartworms every year? Today we are blogging about a very important subject: heartworms.
Heartworms are spread from dog to dog by mosquitoes. Since mosquitos are very common in this area, and we can have days warm enough for mosquitoes year round in this area, we must protect our canines from heartworm year round.
It is much easier to prevent heartworm disease than to treat it. Preventing heartworm disease involves taking an inexpensive monthly pill, while treating heartworm disease involves a series of expensive injections. While a dog is undergoing heartworm treatment its exercise must be extremely limited, otherwise a dying worm could break off and block a blood vessel in the heart or lungs which could lead to death. Additionally, most often by the time a dog has undergone treatment for heartworms, it already has permanent lung and heart damage from the worms.
Heartworm prevention pills contain a medication that kills heartworm larvae, thus preventing the heartworm from growing into the adults that cause damage. Each month when you give your dog a heartworm prevention pill, you kill any heartworm larvae that the dog has been infected with in the past month. Therefore, if you do not give the pill every month, then the heartworm larvae could grow into adult heartworms which are not affected by heartworm preventative.
So why test dogs before starting heartworm prevention and then anually? Some dogs that are heartworm positive can have a shock-like reaction to the medication in heartworm prevention. Yearly heartworm testing also ensures that the heartworm prevention is effective and will also find any dogs that have developed heartworm disease due to any laspes in heartworm prevention.
