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Does your pet have internal parasites?
Are your pet's parasites a threat to you and your family?

ACCORDING to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, tapeworms, hookworms, roundworms, and whipworms are health threats both to your pets and to you.

Internal parasites are very common in animals, and are seen in veterinary practices like Hollywood Pet Hospital every day. The most common internal parasites we see are roundworms and tapeworms. These, as with most other parasites, can be easily diagnosed with a simple test on a bowel movement sample from your pet. Roundworms are common inhabitants of animals' intestines early in their life. It is extrememly important to rid the animals of these parasites so they can grow and be healthy. Tapeworms are really just a nuisance parasite (thought intolerable to most owners!) which has the dog or cat flea as an intermediate host. In other words, if your pet eats a flea, as happens especially when cats groom themselves, there is a good chance that you pet will develop tapeworms. The type of tapeworm we see is the dog or cat type tapeworm, which are not contagious to people, although there are tapeworms in food animals (mostly in other countries) which humans can contract.

Animal parasites which can be transferred to people are termed ZOONOSES (as are any diseases which humans and animals can share). Zoonosis is possible with roundworms, whipworms, hookworms, and specific types of tapeworms (as mentioned above). Most of the zoonotic potential of these parasites relates to children who do not wash their hands after playing with pets, or who eat unusual things (and may thus ingest some feces or cat litter). Roundworm and hookworm larvae can enter a person's body, and then migrate through the body and into organs such as the eye or liver, or out through the skin. This is a condition that is seen surprisingly often in this country. According to the CDC, 10,000 children are infected with roundworm larva each year, and about 750 of them lose their eyesight from this infection.

Zoonoses are easy to control with yearly stool sample exams for your pets, and automatic and frequent puppy and kitten worming. This is why we ask you to bring a fecal sample every year to check your pet for intestinal parasites. We can assume that most puppies and kittens have roundworm larvae acquired in utero from their mother that will develop gradually through the first four to five months of life. And so we worm all puppies with a Heartgard Plus tablet at each of their vaccine visits, and all kittens with a liquid wormer. For those of you with adult dogs on Heartgard Plus, your dog is wormed once a month.