Even areas with fewer mosquitos can be hotbeds of heartworm infection.

Q. We don’t see a lot of mosquitoes in my practice area. Is it really necessary to push prevention?
A. Veterinarians often refer to their locales as being “endemic” or “nonendemic” for heartworm. For those in many of the Western and Mountain states, the assumption is that if heartworm historically hasn’t been a problem in the region, there’s no reason to recommend yearly testing or heartworm prevention now. I moved to Phoenix—which is in a supposedly nonendemic region less than 18 months ago. During that time, I’ve performed several surgeries for heartworm caval syndrome on dogs that had never left the Phoenix area.

While heartworm education is a year-round focus of the American Heartworm Society (AHS), many veterinary practices put extra emphasis on heartworm prevention and education in the spring, especially since April is National Heartworm Awareness Month. Therefore, it’s a good time to consider the many resources available to veterinary practices from the AHS.

It happens. It happens a lot. Here are your best practices when a lapse in heartworm preventive delivery occurs.

While a heartworm diagnosis is tough news for dog owners, dogs can be safely and successfully treated. The American Heartworm Society’s 2014 Current Canine Guidelines for the Prevention, Diagnosis, and Management of Heartworm (Dirfilaria immitis) Infection in Dogs treatment protocol calls for, in most dogs, preadulticide treatment with a heartworm preventive (macrocyclic lactones) and doxycycline, as well as three injections of melarsomine to kill the adult worms that threaten the infected dog’s life and long-term health.

(StatePoint) Your dog is your best friend, and you take good care of him, making sure he gets quality food andexercise, immunizations and heartworm medication. Why,then, does your veterinarian also insist on a yearly heartworm test?

Forgetting that monthly preventive—it's so easy to do, even for veterinarians and their own pets (you know you've forgotten a time or two!). Here's why and how to not let clients skip a dose again.

Historically, heartworm disease has been overlooked in cats, yet it has provoved to be serious and potentially fatal. Because there is no approved treatment for heartworm infection in cats as there is in dogs, prevention of infection is the best protection. 

Here's a glance at the top veterinary news stories on dvm360.com in 2015.

Whenever we sit down to rank the top-performing news stories on dvm360.com, we look for common themes that could tie the year together. And in 2015, you couldn’t be bothered with a certain reality-TV veterinarian’s behavior—this year, your focus was all about the medicine. So without further ado, your top ten stories of the past year.

 

 

Not long ago, heartworm disease (HWD) was considered a problem of the South—it was endemic in the Southeast, Gulf Coast, and Mississippi Delta regions of the United States. Today, we find heartworms not only present in, but also transmitted in, every state in the continental U.S. as well as Hawaii (Figure 1).1

 

According to the American Heartworm Society, over one million dogs in the United States are currently infected with Dirofilaria immitis (heartworms). If diagnosed in a timely fashion, most infections can be managed medically with good results.