Heartworms – A Serious Threat to Pets

Pet owners should never be reckless when it comes to security of their pet’s heart. A pet’s entire life is dependent on how their parents take care of them and do not risk it by letting a mosquito bite them.

A mosquito isn’t a menial parasite, it has great potential to cause harm to both humans and pets. Incidents amongst human involving mosquito bites are of course heard about. Dog-parents might be aware of a threatening condition named Heartworms. Heartworms is malignant health condition that is spread by a mosquito bite. It is generally found in dogs but can also be observed in cats in some cases. Mosquito transmits microfilaria larvae into the pet’s blood stream. As it enters the host’s body, the larvae takes at least 6 months to grow into adult heartworms. Mature adult heartworms can live up to 7 years in dog’s body. Heartworms inhabit themselves in the heart, lungs and blood vessels of the system.

These adult heartworms are treacherous parasites than chokes up different blood vessels of hearts and lungs. The clinical signs that your pet is infected by heartworms are:

• Mild Cough
• Exercise Intolerance
• Easily Tired
• Weigh Loss
• Loss of Appetite

Sometimes, usually in the early stage of formation of larvae and mature worms, your dog might not show any spotting symptoms of the presence of the disease. So, it might be hard to detect heartworms. To overcome such circumstances, you must take your pet for an annual checkup to the veterinarian.

Once your dog has been infected with heartworm disease, it is quite difficult and expensive to recover his health. It is preferred to prevent such ailments rather than treating it afterwards. Dog owners must be motivated to provide their pets with the best preventative to keep heartworms aside. There are multiple forms of treatment available for pooches to protect them from this harmful disease.

Topical treatments like Advocate for dogs and oral treatments like Heartgard Plus, Nexgard Spectra chews, Milbemax tablets for Dogs etc. are a few known and recommended preventions you can and must take for the safety of your beloved pooch.

Keep in mind that you must start a prevention program of the above treatments only when your pooch has been detected negative for heartworm disease. This is due the reason that the preventives eliminates and restricts the growth of heartworm larvae that are about to grow into mature adult forms.

All dogs have only one heart and safety of that heart is in your hands.