A Short Guide to Piroplasmosis
3 minute
Piroplasmosis and a detailed description of this disease can be found in many places on the Internet, this is what I think confuses owners and what owners should know.
To begin with, how to remove a tick?
What NOT to do if your dog has ticks:
- call the vet at 3:00 a.m. if you have an emergency case of a vicious tick on your dog
- drink the tick with alcohol (even if it's grandma's best plum wine that cures everything from cuticles to glaucoma)
- suffocate it in grease (it is even more difficult to pull a greasy tick out of the skin)
- soak it with acetone, etc.
Such procedures only cause more more harm than good - torture the tick and it usually 'vomits' in the place where it was caught
What to do if your dog has a tick? SPEED IS IMPORTANT!
You have 24 to 48 hours. It takes a tick so much that if it is infected, it can transmit the pathogen to your dog
*(Means to fight against ticks - there are repellents - which drive away ticks -iš..iš.. and ticks do not come close to such a dog. And the means that are silent killers - allow the tick to get on the dog, but kill it before the tick can transmit the disease agent. Sometimes the owners are very unhappy that they bought expensive protection against ticks and then they still find ticks on the dog, this is the case with 'silent stealth killers', they may not meet your expectations of a tick-free dog, but they generally successfully kill ticks)
**not a single agent is 100% effective in the fight against ticks
- pluck the tick from the skin with fingers, nails, tweezers...teeth ;)
- you can rotate it clockwise and counterclockwise (ticks don't know how to look at the clock!), or you can just pull it out (the story about ticks twisting into the skin like a corkscrew... it doesn't stand... ticks bite into the skin /bite)
- if a part of the tick's body remains stuck in the skin - head, leg, you do not need to panic and prepare the dog for surgery! Such a part can cause a slight local reaction, redness or a pimple, after which the body will throw it out
Yes, yes, I know there are dogs that have tick bites nasty bumps on the body, but that's the way it is, like with people, some react to a mosquito bite with a local reaction of a few millimeters, and some with a reaction of a few centimeters. That part of the tick's body, left behind in the skin, cannot transmit the causative agent of the disease. a beautiful, fat, honestly eaten tick, it is possible that my dog will be great for the next twenty days, and then the symptoms of the disease will appear:
- depression,
- lethargy,
- increased body temperature (the dog looks around the apartment for tiles to lie down on and cool down),
- loss of appetite,
- dark colored urine
Treatment of the disease Generally vets love this disease, as perverse as it sounds…. So you act like God, the dog is nothing today, you give one injection and the dog is almost completely the old one by the next day. Only that this injection is not completely harmless, which means that it is not good for your dog to receive it if he does not have proven piroplasmosis!
How to prove piroplasmosis?! The vet has to take some blood from your dog, do a blood smear and check if there are small kidney formations in your dog's erythrocytes - babesia (all this takes 1 hour). This is the only correct way to prove this disease and every vet should perform this procedure before 'giving your dog the miracle shot'.
Which Von BARF products do we recommend for dogs diagnosed with piroplasmosis and who consequently suffer from anemia:
- Von BARF Premium Selection Horse
- Von BARF Premium selection Game.
Horse and venison are types of meat rich in iron.
It is a rich source of chlorophyll - a green plant pigment that is proven to help in faster recovery from anemia. This is because the molecules of hemoglobin and chlorophyll are very similar in structure, and their role is similar, and both pigments participate in the metabolism of oxygen and carbon dioxide.