Welcome to my first official blog post of 2020! I am very excited for what is to come this year. I have a lot of fun stuff planned so make sure to subscribe to know when I post something.
Today’s post is all about those pesky heart worms. These parasites live in the heart, lungs, or blood vessels of dogs and cats and can create serious problems. They restrict the blood flow to the rest of the body causing the heart to work a lot harder than normal to try and compensate for it. With this constant hard work the heart can easily get overworked and become strained. It’s kinda like if you were to do a lot of exercise without stopping- you would eventually get tired and overworked.
The scientific name of heart worms is Dirofilaria immitis and is a kind of parasitic worm. It travels between animals through mosquitoes. Baby heart worms (called microfilariae) are small enough to get sucked up by the mosquito when drinking blood from an animal where they can then grow and thrive before getting passed into the next victim.
These tiny, string like worms can be found in blood tests taken from an infected animal.
Treatment is no fun. It is a two-step process and can be very dangerous. The veterinarian will start by giving a medication that will kill the adult worms, but this may cause the arteries to block up with the dead worms. After that, a medication is used to kill the baby heart worms, which is not as dangerous as they are so small.
Luckily, there are ways to prevent heart worms before the animal may get it. Using heart worm tablets given daily or once a month and a topical medication applied monthly the chance of an animal get heart worm is taken down significantly.
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I got most of my information from my class on veterinary assistant on ed2go.com.
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