Royal Dog Clinic

Parasite Control

Parasites are organisms that depend on a host to survive and spread. There are three main types of parasites, and their symptoms vary. Treatment depends on the kind of parasite you have but may include prescription medications. Practicing good hygiene, thoroughly cooking meat and drinking clean water helps prevent many parasites.

Parasites are organisms that live in, on or with another organism (host). They feed, grow or multiply in a way that harms their host. However, they need their host for their survival. For this reason, they rarely kill their host, but they often carry diseases that can be life-threatening.

FECs use a measured amount of feces and solution, and then plug the number into a formula to get the egg count. FEC usually is done more than once; in order to interpret them they are performed over time and because of that they are the test primarily used to definitively define the degree of drug resistance in an animal or herd. It is also important when evaluating a fecal float or FEC to be aware of how prolific of an egg layer the nematode is. For example, one Toxocara canis (roundworm) can produce over 20,000 eggs each day while a whipworm only produces about 1000 per day.

Parasite Infection and Tools for Diagnosis

Parasites, either internal (for example, worms) or external (for example, fleas and ticks), draw nutrients away from the host, and can cause disease. This chapter will focus on demonstration of how your understanding of the life cycle of parasites for various species in different environments will help minimize infection or infestation and help with control of the parasite in the environment. The biggest difference appears to be in overall management between large animals and small animals. In large animals, there is concern about resistance of parasites to available deworming medications and great attention is paid to minimizing development of resistant parasites. This may include leaving a small population of worms untreated, so there always are susceptible worms in the overall population and we are not just continually killing off susceptible worms and leaving behind more and more resistant worms. In small animals, where parasites can be a significant public health concern, it is a goal to kill all internal and external parasites. This does not mean there are no concerns about resistance; in 2021, resistance in hookworms, one intestinal parasite of dogs, was described.

Gastrointestinal parasites are the class most commonly addressed. Some common tools used to evaluate presence of gastrointestinal parasites are fecal flotation tests and fecal egg counts. Fecal egg counts are basically quantified fecal flotations. You will also hear fecal flotations called fecal floats. Dr. Erin Burton provides the following differentiation between these two kinds of tests and how they’re interpreted: A fecal flotation is a qualitative assessment of the eggs in a sample, while a fecal egg count (FEC) is a quantitative assessment. Fecal flotations are lax on the amount of solution and feces used for each float and so give at best a semi-quantitative assessment of egg burden. For example, tapeworm eggs generally are released within tapeworm segments, or proglottids, and because the individual eggs are not in the feces and the proglottids are too heavy to float, tapeworm infections generally cannot be diagnosed by fecal flotation testing. Thus, having larger numbers of whipworm eggs on a float or FEC is more indicative of a heavy worm burden than abundant Toxocara eggs on float or FEC. Finally, be aware that not all gastrointestinal parasites can be identified by fecal flotation testing.