Dog Parasites - How to Prevent, Diagnose and Treat Dog Parasites

We want to start deworming your puppy and get them on some preventatives as soon as you get them, so any time between six and eight weeks, let's get that deworming and flea prevention started. We'd get heartworm prevention started pretty quickly after that, too.

Dr. Michele Drake
The Drake Center for Veterinary Care

There are a couple of different types of parasites. There are protozoan parasites that are pretty much microscopic, things like Giardia and bacteria that can cause some GI stuff. But for parasites, there are intestinal parasites like worms, and these are worms in the intestines.

The most common external parasites we see in dogs would be fleas and ticks, but they can also get ear mites and even lice. We're most used to seeing fleas and ticks, and the way to get rid of them is to come in and let us diagnose what they have and then look into the whole situation. How many pets do you have at home? Are they indoor, outdoor? What are their conditions? We can help pick out the best preventative and treatment plan for you.

Get them in here right away because some parasites are zoonotically transmitted to humans. We love dogs and kids being together, but we certainly don't want any children being exposed to roundworms or hookworms, so let's just get them in here right away.

With external parasites, we can usually visualize them. With ear mites or some skin mites, like scabies or Demodex, we may do a skin scraping or an ear smear of your dog and look under the microscope. To test for intestinal parasites, we'll quite often take a fecal sample—a small amount of the stool, and we'll send it in to a lab or in-house. We can use that to look under a microscope and diagnose intestinal parasites.

Ringworm is a fungus. It's a saprophytic fungus, which means it comes from the soil. Ringworm is pretty common just about anywhere, but it's not a parasite.

Well, nobody wants to live with itchy things on their skin or their ears, and certainly, intestinal parasites can make you feel ill, so we like to get those treated as soon as possible.

If you still have other questions and you'd like to reach out to us, you can call us directly at (760) 456-9556, you can email us, or you can reach out on Facebook. But please do reach out, and we'll get back to you as fast as we can.

Dog Parasites - FAQs

Dr. Michele Drake
The Drake Center for Veterinary Care

We have a combination of oral medication and topical medications. It depends on the situation, but for the most part, we want every dog on Sentinel, which is a once-monthly pill you give your dog to prevent roundworms, hookworm, or whipworms, flea infestations, and heartworms. And then we have some topical medications; at the Drake Center, we also use Bravecto, a pill that kills fleas for three months and ticks for three months. Ticks have encroached on just about every community in the United States now, and we do not want dogs being exposed to ticks because they transmit diseases. Not to mention, they can infest your house too. We don't want that happening, so we recommend Sentinel and Bravecto, pills to prevent and then treat any possible infestation with fleas or ticks.

Yeah, we want everybody in the household - every dog and cat - on some type of preventative or some kind of medication to make sure that the dogs and cats and the family members are not exposed to any parasites.

Some parasites can be transmitted from dogs to humans. Good handwashing and sanitation are the best ways to avoid that, but children are not always perfect when they wash their hands before they eat, which is why we make sure that your dog does not have any parasites to can't be transmitted to anybody.

Parasites have learned how to live on the pet for their entire lives. They will not go away on their own, so we need to treat them to get rid of them.

There are all kinds of anecdotes out there made of brewers yeast and essential oils. I don't know; there are just tons of them out there. They don't work at all—you're wasting your money, and sometimes they're even more dangerous than they sound. Just because they're natural doesn't mean they're safe, effective, or okay to use. The best thing is to come in here and have us help you pick out the best preventative and treatment plan for your dog and cat.

Again, we'll recommend the best products for you. And then if you use them, you shouldn't have to do anything else in your home. If you do have a bad flea infestation, we'll have you vacuum a lot, but really we just want to treat the pet.

If you still have other questions and you'd like to reach out to us, you can call us directly at (760) 456-9556, you can email us, or you can reach out on Facebook. But please do reach out, and we'll get back to you as fast as we can.