How Heartworm Prevention Protects Your Pet
Heartworm prevention is crucial for maintaining your pet’s health and preventing disease, along with routine vaccinations and wellness checks. Keep your four-legged friend on heartworm prevention year-round because mosquitoes don’t hibernate during the winter and heartworm disease has been identified in every U.S. state.
The heartworm life cycle
Although these parasites prefer canine hosts, heartworms can infect any mammal. Microfilariae, or heartworm larvae (L1), are ingested from the blood vessels when a mosquito bites an infected animal. The larvae are stimulated to molt to the L2 stage by the mosquito’s gastric juices, after which they migrate to the mosquito’s salivary glands and molt into infectious L3 larvae. The L3 larvae swam under the pet’s subcutaneous tissue to feed when the mosquito was feeding. The larvae develop through two stages of molting over time, moving toward the pet’s heart until they eventually reach the main pulmonary artery, where they mature and reproduce.
How heartworm prevention works
Inside the pet, the mosquito goes through multiple larval stages, but only two larval stages are susceptible to heartworm prevention. Once heartworm larvae reach juvenile or adult stages, preventives can no longer kill them, and they need treatment with an arsenic-containing drug, which is costly and harsh.
You can effectively eliminate heartworm larvae by administering a monthly heartworm preventive to your pet, whether it be an oral chewable or a topical liquid. In order to prevent the life cycle from continuing and endangering your pet, monthly prevention is essential because immature larvae can molt into the adult stage in as little as 51 days. You can also administer injections every six or twelve months that have a slow release mechanism to ensure that heartworm larvae are killed before they molt. Heartworm prevention ultimately stops the potentially fatal heartworm disease, even though it does not stop mosquitoes from biting your pet or the spread of heartworm larvae.
In honor of National Heartworm Awareness Month, investigate heartworm preventive options for your pet. Give our team a call to discuss the heartworm preventive that will best keep your four-legged pal safe from disease.