First, a caveat; I am not giving veterinary medical advice. I'm only posting the advice I was given for dogs I have working in the impacted area.

There is an area that extends through Eastern Arkansas, Western Tennessee and Northern Mississippi that has seen an increase in dogs testing positive for heartworm among dog on a monthly preventative. I've had two. Another larger police department has had several. A well run, FEMA SAR team has had several. That area is also well known for retriever breeders and trainers. They too are showing significant increases in heartworm positive dogs. Auburn University has been doing a study. A professor at Auburn, along with a professor at University of Virginia, both recognized experts in the field of canine heartworm, have been working diligently to find out what in the world is going on. At any rate, I was advised Thursday (April 1, 2010) a particular protocol would be a prudent move until they (the researchers) can get a better feel for what is going on.

1. Have all dogs in the affected area tested semi-annually.

2. Administer Heartguard on the 1st of each month

3. Administer Advantage Multi on the 15th of each month.

Again; I'm not advising anyone to follow this protocol. I'm only relating advice I was given for our high drive working dogs. Only those dogs assigned to the impacted area are subject to this protocol.

While I"m not a big fan of pumping more and more poison into dogs, I am a dog trainer not a medical professional. While I'm not afraid to "doctor" bumps, bruises and abrasions on my own, advice such as this I take serious. Both dogs that tested positive have been treated and are back to work. For one dog it was a particularly tough road. While he is back to normal now, had he been an older dog, it probably would have killed him. He was just 3 when treated and was out 6 months. Economically, that is an expensive asset that we spent a considerable amount of money to get back to working condition. At any rate, if you are in the impacted area, I would seriously consider contacting my veterinarian for advice.

DFrost

I'm in west TN and there have been breakthroughs for several years. At first they thought, of course, it was owner non-compliance. Then they thought pups weren't being started on it early enough. Now enough has happened, they're pretty sure it's true breakthrough. As David said, vets don't yet know what it means.

As for the Heartgard, it is ivermectin. I AM NOT A VETERINARIAN. You can purchase ivermectin 1% injectible over-the-counter at livestock supply stores and give it *by mouth* to dogs as heartworm preventative. It's given monthly at 1cc per 100 lbs. I use a 1cc syringe to make dosing most accurate. It's much, much, much cheaper to give.

Heartgard Plus has pyrantel mixed with it, and pyrantel can also be purchased separately over the counter and is cheaper. There's probably no need to give an adult dog pryantel (kills intestinal worms) every month.

FWIW, this is what veterinary students did for our own dogs when we were in veterinary college.

Is there any link to data from these findings? Or to the research that is being done? I like to able to pass on as much information as I can to working Border Collie folks in that region.

You might try contacting Auburn. I don't have any links, my information is from my attending Veterinarian. HE provided me the protocol we are currently using after consultation with one of the Vets doing the study.

DFrost

 Quote: Paula Colvett

I'm in west TN and there have been breakthroughs for several years. At first they thought, of course, it was owner non-compliance. Then they thought pups weren't being started on it early enough. Now enough has happened, they're pretty sure it's true breakthrough. As David said, vets don't yet know what it means.

As for the Heartgard, it is ivermectin. I AM NOT A VETERINARIAN. You can purchase ivermectin 1% injectible over-the-counter at livestock supply stores and give it *by mouth* to dogs as heartworm preventative. It's given monthly at 1cc per 100 lbs. I use a 1cc syringe to make dosing most accurate. It's much, much, much cheaper to give.

Heartgard Plus has pyrantel mixed with it, and pyrantel can also be purchased separately over the counter and is cheaper. There's probably no need to give an adult dog pryantel (kills intestinal worms) every month.

FWIW, this is what veterinary students did for our own dogs when we were in veterinary college.

You should never Heartworm treat a dog without testing dog and it being negative prior to treating. If the dog tests positive and it's heart is full of larvae or adult worms, you treat the dog, you now kill the worms and cause a plug making the heart unable to function correctly. The dog will most likely die.

This thread is many months old.

Good point about testing before starting a new Heartgard protocol.

There is a more recent one detailing heartworm treatment as recently experienced by a dog whose owner posts here, including the description of how the worms are killed and what they do in the body of the dog undergoing treatment.

http://leerburg.com/forums/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/309671/page/0/fpart/2

There's a graphic description of that dead-worm-plugging, too. It gave me a far more vivid mind-picture than I had ever had.

This was by far the most accessible of all the descriptions/explanations I found in vet manuals, etc. (although there was no variation in actual points, facts):


QUOTE:
The perfect treatment for a disease needs to satisfy several requirements: the treatment should be 100% effective and it should be completely safe for the patient. If it were also easy to do, and inexpensive, that would be perfect. When the standard treatment for a disease fails to satisfy all four of those requirements, people begin to look for alternatives. Sometimes this results in better treatments. Sometimes it results in the patient receiving no effective treatment because he's busy getting some quack remedy that does nothing at all (or kills him. Remember Laetrile?).

Treating a dog to clear him of heartworms is a situation where the state of the art is not perfect. Prevention of the disease with monthly preventive medicine has been effective most of the time. Treating the dog who has adult, foot-long worms in his heart -- that's a different story.

The conventional view is that the worms are in the right ventricle of the heart, and the big pulmonary artery trunk. If you do a post-mortem on a dog who has died from heartworms, you'll find a lot of them there. In a dog with a lower worm burden, there are not so many worms in the heart.

Most of the worms will actually be in the pulmonary arteries (taking blood from the right side of the heart to the lungs to get oxygen). There may not be any worms in the heart. If you open this dog at post-mortem, even though there may not be huge numbers of worms, you can cut the lung way out at the edge and find worms in the blood vessels.

The worms don't eat the heart or arteries, they just float. When there are so many worms present that they clog the outflow from the heart (like roots in a pipe), the heart wears out (prematurely) from the constant overwork of pushing blood through the clog.

Actually the worms don't just float -- they swim upstream. If they just floated, the pressure in the artery would force them downstream until they hit a branch too small to pass. This would clog the artery either partially or completely, resulting in poor circulation to the downstream area of lung. The dog might get a secondary pneumonia in this damaged area. If he ran hard, increasing heart rate and blood pressure, the damaged artery could blow out, hemorrhaging into the lungs. Indeed this does happen in some dogs, though most infected dogs develop the less dramatic signs of congestive heart failure: weight loss, coughing (especially after exercise), labored breathing, fainting spells and so forth.

This is ALWAYS what happens when the dog is treated to kill the heartworms. Worms who have been swimming upstream, keeping the artery open, float downstream and clog up the works. Unlike an intestinal worm infection (hookworms, roundworms, tapeworms, etc.), there's no exit here. With intestinal worms, you kill the worms and they leave the body with the next bowel movement. With heartworms, they clog up the works like a blood clot would (except that few blood clots are a foot long). You've heard that you shouldn't get an air-bubble injected -- how about a handful of foot-long worms? The only way to get rid of them is to let the body's microscopic white blood cell defenders eat them. They'll do it, but it's a slow process, like termites eating your house. It takes weeks after the death of the worms before the body dissolves them out of the circulation and opens all those clogs.

This is the unsatisfactory part of the heartworm treatment. It's why dogs feel bad a week or so after they are treated. That's when the worms die and shift position. The dog may have a fever, cough, lose appetite, have trouble breathing, or cough up blood. Sometimes you don't see any of those things, but you can just tell that your dog doesn't feel good. You know your dog, and even though he may not have specific signs, you can tell when he doesn't feel well. This is the reason we ask you to restrict the dog's activity for several weeks after treatment -- no hard running for a while.

Most complications of treatment are minor and very treatable. Severe problems like blood-vessel rupture or allergic-shock-like reactions are extremely rare. It could happen, but most dogs have years added to their lifespan when the heartworms are destroyed.

Here's the crux of the matter, and the reason I'm writing today. Ill effects during the heartworm treatment are related almost exclusively to the dead worms clogging up the pulmonary arteries. The drug that's used (Immiticide TM - melarsomine dihydrochloride) is unlikely to cause anything worse than some temporary soreness at the injection site. It takes those little worms five days to die and they're taking a bath in it. There just isn't enough drug to bother the dog (unless he has some pre-existing severe liver disease). That's why it doesn't matter whether your alternative remedy is a better chemical, a cheaper chemical, organic, holistic, homeopathic, herbal or black magic. If it kills the worms, the arterial blood pressure is going to shoot them downstream and clog up the works.

I've seen people use D-con rat poison, gunpowder, and levamisole (a sheep-wormer that is VERY hard on the dog's liver). Today a client brought in some misinformation he'd downloaded from some "Natural" website (with many products for sale). Their nostrum is alleged to be superior because "There seems to be no risks of the parasites dislodging and creating vessel blockage." Yeah? Do the worms die or don't they? If they die, they're going to move. You may not have seen an artery pumping, but a two-millimeter artery will shoot three feet in the air if your clamp slips off before you get it tied. Dead worms don't swim - they go scooting downstream.

I wish that our standard heartworm treatment was 100% effective, safe, easy and inexpensive. It doesn't totally satisfy any of those criteria. It is usually effective in eliminating all the worms, most dogs have no complications (or very minor and easily treatable ones), and it just takes two injections, 24 hours apart. But, it's not cheap. And you have to let the body deal with those dead worms. There's just no way around that, no matter how you kill them. END

very cool - I know the thread was old - but people still read it - so didn't want them to think they could just go out, buy a tube of horse wormer and give some to their dogs for heartworm!

Isn't that an excellent step-by-step? I really understood the whole treatment progression for the first time, including "where do the worms go?"

Of course, treatment triggers the same clog effect, but treatment also involves carefully monitoring and restricting the dog's movements during the span of time when the dead worms are destroyed and absorbed.

Is there any problem continuing to give oral ivomectin to a nursing bitch? She has been on it successfully all along.