Dog parasite is developing resistance to treatments

https://news.uga.edu/hookworms-are-developing-resistance-to-medications/

by gmays • 5 years ago

149 91 5 years ago

news.uga.edu

Ancalagon2• 5 years ago

It’s really unfortunate how filthy many dog parks are. My dogs love hanging out there but they’ve come back with fleas a couple times, and after starting whole anti flea regiments and finally removing the pests I just can’t bring myself to take them back

Isthatablackgsd• 5 years ago

Did you use flea preventative care before this happened? If so, what brand did you use? I am curious if various type of flea preventative care has different impacts on those fleas. My GSD is on Simparica (monthly oral med) and never got the fleas from the dog park. My GSD goes there bi-weekly for exercise and improving dog socialization.

Ancalagon2• 5 years ago

To be honest I didn't have them on flea preventatives. I never had an issue with fleas until the past year going to a popular dog park in a temperate area (which I guess means the fleas can live longer than say a desert).

Now I have them on the monthly NexGard chewables (prescription from the vet). I havent seen a flea on or off of them in months.

fumar• 5 years ago

I am not sold on giving our dog oral flea pesticide. We’ve been able to git rid of fleas by increased cleaning (vacuuming all areas once per day), changing the dog’s bedding frequently, and spot removing the adult fleas. Effectively, you want to break the flea life cycle. It is doable without medication, but it requires high levels of upkeep.

jaytaylor2• 5 years ago

PSA: Anywhere there are cats or wild animals (like squirrels, racoons, etc) tends to have healthy flea populations throughout the environment.

I give my dogs a special "cookie" quarterly which makes it so any flea that bites them becomes sterile and makes doggos no longer a vector.

Few things are worse than tiny almost invisible pests in your home or living on / biting loved ones!

fillskills• 5 years ago

Is it homemade or something that can be bought OTC?

Fogest• 5 years ago

Yeah our current dog has barely ever been to the dog park, we decided to change it up and bring her there. A day or two later and she has kennel cough.

But I also think our dog has a bad immune system. We pet sit a dog for 5-6 hours and it had a bit of a sneeze. We all just thought it was allergies because it was a young dog and the vet assumed it was allergies. Well a day or two later again and our dog has a sneeze, tons of green snot, and our vet suspected it was a bad infection, possibly pneumonia. She is only just about 2 years old and already seems to be getting any disease she gets near.

SV_BubbleTime2• 5 years ago

We stopped going to the dog park, because that’s where you take your dog if you want to learn bad behavior. The cleanliness of our local wasn’t really an issue. But I’m glad we stopped going. Asking for trouble sometimes.

DanCarvajal4• 5 years ago

I own a former racing Greyhound and it took forever to get rid of our boy's hookworms. Annoyingly, as soon as they were gone he got a new round of worms from the rather terrible grounds of the apartment complex we lived in at the time. The new worms were much easier to get rid of than the track worms.

Dog tracks are filthy, they should all be shut down.

luma• 5 years ago

Any insight as to how you managed to get rid of the track worms in your grey? We're still battling that here and nothing seems to last.

DanCarvajal4• 5 years ago

We did the typical recommendation from adoption groups now days is Drontal combined with AdvantageMulti. Drontal to kill the worms and AdvantageMulti to prevent reinfection during and after the killing. Lately I have heard of groups switching bovine grade dewormers, especially for dogs from Mexican tracks.

yellow_lead• 5 years ago

That's interesting that it supports the article. Seems the hookworms on the track evolved against common medication, but the ones in your apartment complex didn't.

DanCarvajal4• 5 years ago

I strongly suspect that to be the case. It was frustrating to put in the work picking up after our dog's bowel movements and spraying the area with a bleach solution only for other people to not pick up enough after their dogs.

gnulinux• 5 years ago

Can you elaborate what is "took forever to get rid of"? My cat had hookworms too as he was a shelter cat. It took 3 rounds of medication to finally cure it (I haven't seen a worm since June 2020). My vet said that's pretty much normal, single dose may not 100% kill all parasites. I live in MA, USA.

chongli• 5 years ago

As I understand it, this problem is due to the worm’s lifecycle and rapid generations. The deworming medication is only effective against the worms themselves, not their eggs. Since the worms lay eggs constantly and hatch quickly it takes several treatments to thin out their numbers and cut off the reproductive cycle.

DanCarvajal4• 5 years ago

Sure it was multiple rounds of multiple medications trying to find which ones could actually kill the dog track worms he had. It took nearly a year all told.

40four• 5 years ago

This is off subject of the worm issue, but my mom has owned retired racing greyhounds for years, and I’ve grown to love the breed.

I get your sentiment, the tracks have been notoriously bad in many aspects of the dogs safety and health. But the issue is more complex then just ‘shutting down’ the tracks I think.

They are wonderful dogs, I love them so much, great personality & demeanor. Especially for a hunting dog, they are great house companions.

But after Florida banned dog racing a couple years ago, the sport is all but dead. ‘Coursing’ in the UK is all but banned as well, so my point is the future of the breed is in jeopardy.

Nobody really hunts with these dogs anymore, so once the competitive outlets are gone ( coursing & track racing), the will be no reason left for breeders to invest time and money into the breed.

Maybe a handful of niche breeders will keep them alive to breed for show or something, but other wise I think it’s important to remember that when we talk about eliminating track racing, we are therefore talking about eliminating the breed from existence.

Sort of a catch 22 right? As distasteful as racing tracks can be, they also are the main reason the breed still exists. Personally I don’t want to see the breed go extinct. They are amazing dogs when you get to know them. It would also be ashamed to lose the bloodlines & the history, the centuries of breeding to create them.

I’m not necessarily trying to support track racing, but I don’t know what a good answer is.

r00fus• 5 years ago

when we talk about eliminating track racing, we are therefore talking about eliminating the breed from existence

I am struggling with this logic. It's not like the dogs themselves will be put to death. We won't be selectively breeding them anymore other than to enjoy their company.

rlt• 5 years ago

I don’t quite understand: lots of people buy purebred dogs from breeders for lots of reasons. If greyhounds are such amazing dogs why wouldn’t people continue to buy them, just perhaps at a smaller scale?

jmull4• 5 years ago

I’m a long-time greyhound lover (6 adopted, and fosters), and I’m not worried about the future of the breed.

They are “greyt” dogs. Many other breeds survive and thrive without racing or other working roles, and I have no doubt greyhounds will as well. People will want them as pets and that will take care of that.

(Personally, I’m only going to adopt rescues, so maybe there won’t be a greyhound in need when the time next comes — but that will be only a temporary disappoint. Really, it’s a sign of progress.)

extraAccount• 5 years ago

I have mixed feelings about dog breeds. They are selectivly bred for a specific set of features for a use-case, if that use-case is gone, is there a purpose for the breed? Other than a companion or to look pretty? Should we feel bad if they go away?

I always owned mutts because that is what all shelters have. And they offer the same amount of love if not more. I didn't pay a cent apart from a donation and I don't have to fear any specific heridetary problem (which is a good and bad thing because I cannot predict health issues).

jmull4• 5 years ago

Same here. We adopted Noodle last year and she had hookworms that took several rounds of treatment to get rid of.

We heard all the hounds the adoption group took in from that track (one in Alabama that closed due to covid) had the same issue. Luckily someone had found a treatment regimen that worked and once our vet switched Noodle to that we finally got rid of the worms.

jbotz3• 5 years ago

Ivermectin has been shown to be highly effective against hookworms [1][2] and so far no parasites seem to have developed any resistance to it. Curious that it's not on the list of drugs approved for treatment of hookworm in dogs in the US.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2723924/ [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6897345/

smileysteve• 5 years ago

Most dogs are going to be on ivermectin to prevent heart worm.

actually_a_dog• 5 years ago

I'm not sure about most, but mine is on Trifexis (spinosad + milbemycin oxime). It protects her against fleas, heartworms, hookworms, roundworms, and whipworms. I haven't seen a single flea on her the entire time I've had her, she just tested negative for heartworm at her last vet visit, and she tolerates it well.

CyberRabbi• 5 years ago

Thanks for the references, I came to ask that. I have a bunch of Ivermectin left over from my bout with Covid. I need to figure out what a good dosage is for my dog in case he gets infected with hookworms.

CrazyPyroLinux2• 5 years ago

I can't tell if you're trolling, but better use the people version for people and the animal version for animals - don't cross the streams.

rainbowzootsuit• 5 years ago

The packages likely have mass/volume or similar measurements that can be scaled. I do this for children's vs babies medicines sometimes as the markup for new parents is intense.

However there maybe other ingredients that wouldn't be good for dogs or the division of the medication might not be straight forward depending on it's form.

outworlder2• 5 years ago

I need to figure out what a good dosage is for my dog in case he gets infected with hookworms.

No you don't. Your vet does.

ravitation3• 5 years ago

A few things.

First, it's very strange that an antiparasitic like ivermectin has become known among mainstream laypersons.

Second, those articles are from the 80s, one is nearly 40 years old.

Third, various antiparasitic medications on the market for dogs contain ivermectin (e.g. Heartgard, Iverhart, and Tri-Heart) - these uses include the prevention or control of hookworm infections.

Finally, when the original article mentions "three types of drugs" to combat parasitic infections, they are referring to the benzimidazole, avermectin/milbemycin (or macrocyclic lactones), and tetrahydropyrimidine classes of drugs - where ivermectin belongs to the avermectin/milbemycin (macrocyclic lactones) class of drugs. With that said, ivermectin-containing compounds are actually a notable part of the research.

x0x02• 5 years ago

It's just where people grew up.

If you had horses, sheep, or goats, you know what ivermectin is.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 5 years ago

First, it's very strange that an antiparasitic like ivermectin has become known among mainstream laypersons.

I don’t find it any more strange that that Remdesivir or mRNA vaccines or even “Coronavirus” is known among the general population. COVID-19 had a huge effect on people and anything related to its treatment or prevention(regardless of the evidence) will have a lot of people know about it.

jbotz3• 5 years ago

it's very strange that an antiparasitic like ivermectin has become known among mainstream laypersons

Who are you calling a "mainstream layperson"? ;-) Well, I'm not a medical professional, but I raise livestock, and ivermectin has been my go-to anti-parasitic since long before Covid.

Johnny5552• 5 years ago

First, it's very strange that an antiparasitic like ivermectin has become known among mainstream laypersons.

Not that strange among laymen dog owners when the package of HeartGard heartworm medicine says "Ivermectin" prominently on the label. People that heard about it as a COVID cure know Ivermectin as horse dewormer, many dog owners know it as a monthly heartworm preventative.

https://entirelypetspharmacy.com/heartgard-for-dogs-51-100lb...

HarryHirsch• 5 years ago

This shouldn't be downvoted, ivermectin is highly effective against nematodes (including hookworm and heartworm) and has a good safety profile, no matter the current conversation. People have used it off-label on dogs for years. If you live in the Southern US you really need to treat your dog and outside cat for fleas and heartworm, and it's not unknown that people who can't afford afford the prescription stuff from vet get a canister of cattle dewormer from the feed store.

That said, our vet told me that there are now case reports from the Mississippi Delta about cases of heartworm in dogs regularly treated with milbemycin, a close relative to ivermectin.

_ea1k2• 5 years ago

I'm baffled as to why a lot of vets in the industry moved away from it to more expensive things, but I guess a lot of it depends on the pet's environment.

jmull4• 5 years ago

Heartgard is pretty common. It has ivermectin (and pyrantel) and controls heartworm, hookworm, and roundworm.

fouric• 5 years ago

It seems like hookworms are developing resistance to treatments in the same that that many bacteria are becoming antibiotic-resistant due to overuse.

Both cases seem like a "tragedy of the commons" - using antibiotics/hookworm treatments (aggressively/preemptively) causes your own livestock/dog to become healthier (or stay healthy in the first place), but increases the chance of mutations that will be resistant to the treatment, which affects everyone (even those not actively using the treatment).

This problem seems not solvable except through regulation, unless I'm missing something.

Actually (and this might sound crazy, but I encourage you to think through it and respond), why not apply this logic to COVID-19 vaccines, as well? That is, why not use non-pharmaceutical means to try to control the virus (which would be equivalent to dog racetrack owners trying to keep their racetrack clean (alcohol misting? dehydration of the track? I don't know anything about this) or farms that raise livestock making their environments less dense and cleaner) and only administer the vaccine to those who are truly at risk? That seems like it would minimize the rate of mutations that specifically affect the effectiveness of the existing treatments. Or is there a difference between SARS-CoV-2 and hookworms/common livestock bacterial infections that matters in this case?

lostapathy• 5 years ago

Or is there a difference between SARS-CoV-2 and hookworms/common livestock bacterial infections that matters in this case?

One can be continuously infected and reinfected with parasites or bacterial. Viral infections like COVID either kill you or get cleared from your system, at which point for all practical purposes you are fairly immune for a while.

ggherbo• 5 years ago

Why have an arms race with something other

Jaepa• 5 years ago

These are all so wildly different that its irresponsible & actively harmful to attempt drawing any parallels.

didibus3• 5 years ago

Actually (and this might sound crazy, but I encourage you to think through it and respond), why not apply this logic to COVID-19 vaccines, as well?

I've never heard of a vaccine that causes viruses to seek resistance to it, that's one major difference. The vaccines don't actually attack the virus, they simply train your body's own immune system to recognize the virus, so that if you get infected, your body's own defenses can more quickly isolate the virus and attack it.

What I've heard happen more often in viruses, is that the more people get the virus and the more their body is slow to stop the virus from reproducing, the more likely the virus is to mutate.

So from my understanding, with viruses, it is the opposite, you want to make sure the virus doesn't get a chance to reproduce itself, because more reproduction = more chance of mutation. And vaccines help lower the reproduction amount of a virus by having people's immune system be able to stop it from doing so much more quickly than otherwise.

why not use non-pharmaceutical means to try to control the virus (which would be equivalent to dog racetrack owners trying to keep their racetrack clean

You mean like for example by social distancing, wearing masks, disinfecting surfaces, improving air flow, and restricting activities that are high contagion spots?

Most countries are doing that already, while also hoping to get people vaccinated so that we can lower the virus' chances of reproducing and thus spreading to others as well as mutating.

Or is there a difference between SARS-CoV-2 and hookworms/common livestock bacterial infections that matters in this case?

It is my understanding that a virus does not reproduce when it is on a surface or in the air, the way that bacteria and parasite can, a virus can only reproduce when inside of a living cell. So the virus will mutate if people have the virus in their body, and their immune system is not able to stop it from reproducing. Vaccines help teach the immune system how to best get rid of the virus in one's body so it doesn't get a lot of chances to reproduce. And measures like social distancing, face covering, surface cleaning, prevent the virus from getting into people's body in the first place, where they could reproduce and thus mutate.

didibus3• 5 years ago

I'm seeing some down-votes, but it's hard for me to know if it's just because of the overly political nature of the topic or if my understanding of viruses in this case is flawed? From my reading on the topics I believe it correct to the best of my abilities, but this is not my area of professional expertise, so I'd love to hear from people who might know more about it.

wizzwizz4• 5 years ago

Actually (and this might sound crazy, but I encourage you to think through it and respond), why not apply this logic to COVID-19 vaccines, as well?

The COVID-19 vaccines train the immune system to attack the spike protein. A mutation that avoids this would successfully dodge the immune system… and not be able to latch onto and infect cells, because the same thing that makes the spike protein work (the shape(?) of the binding site(?)) is also the thing that makes the immune system attack it.

It's theoretically possible for a SARS-CoV-2 virus to be so mutated (SARS-CoV-3?) that the spike protein is radically different, but in a way that just so happens to also work. However, that's unlikely – the immune system also pays attention to other bits of a virus (even though the mRNA vaccine doesn't), and in the unlikely event this happened, the immune system would probably be able to kill the mutated version without problems.

But it could happen, if there are breeding populations of COVID-19 in people with weak / unprimed immune systems – for the same reason you need to take the full course of antibiotics, we need to get as many people as possible vaccinated.

---

The important thing isn't medication. Do a heat treatment of some agar that isn't quite hot enough, and the bacteria will become heat resistant. Anything that provides selection pressure (kills some, but not all, of the population) can trigger evolution in the direction of “thing is less good at killing”.

A single (mutant) heat-resistant bacterium will probably die in a 121°C pressurised steam environment, but might survive 5 minutes of an 80°C environment that most of its fellow bacteria die to. Then a substantial portion of the surviving bacteria twenty generations later (i.e. a million times more bacteria) would be heat-resistant descendants of this survivor, making the once-effective treatment much less effective.

Also: bacteria can share DNA between each other, so if one becomes resistant, it can share its resistance with other bacteria. Viruses can't do this; viruses are almost inert outside cells, and it's unlikely that two different viruses will infect the same cell at the same time. (It does happen, though, with influenza, because there's so much influenza and, more importantly, several strains of similar-enough versions for a recombination to be viable.)

PBnFlash• 5 years ago

Assuming this is in good faith, the answer is it does apply evolutionary pressure on covid to develop a spike protein that can avoid the immune system.

Convalescent people do have a more diverse immune response, to other parts of the virus. And after a vaccine actually have even stronger responses still.

The immune response to covid and the spike protein in immunized people is very uniform and the antibodies we produce are very similar (although not identical.)

But the specificity of the spike targeting was chosen for a reason, it is VERY unlikely there is another spike protein that will work as well and entirely evade the immune system. Studies have been done and threatening spike mutations have been checked, and it doesn't seem like there are good alternatives.

didibus3• 5 years ago

it does apply evolutionary pressure on covid to develop a spike protein that can avoid the immune system

The way you say this, it seems to imply some kind of intelligent mutation, is that true of viruses? I was under the impression that they would simply accidentally evolve around it as they reproduce themselves over and over. Thus if you limit their ability to reproduce, you'd limit their chances of mutating in ways that avoid the immune response.

Where as for bacteria, my understanding was that, while it similarly accidentally evolves around it, by abusing antibiotics, you kill the bacteria that isn't resistant, thus the resistant bacteria will proliferate in its place, and possibly eventually become the dominant strain. While if you'd left the body deal with the bacteria, this would not happen, and so you should only resort to antibiotics in cases where the person's immune system is losing the battle.

yyyk• 5 years ago

The immune system does not work that way. When you present an antigen to it, it trains a variety of antibodies to different sites on the antigen, and these antibodies are slightly different for every person.

It's as if instead of taking one antibiotic against a bacterial infection, you took many slightly different ones at the same time, and every treatment of antibiotics differed. Obviously, bacteria are much less likely to develop resistance that way.

Vaccine evasion can happen if the virus mutates so much it's almost unrecognizable (flu) or if the vaccine is too narrowly targeted and it presents not enough sites for the immune system, so a single mutation is enough for immunity.

The former apparently doesn't apply to Covid**, the latter basically never happens - the old dead/weakened methods avoided this by design, while the newer methods learnt to watch out for this and present enough of the virus.

* Mutations kept the spike. There were several mutations that changed it so there's a limited level of evasion from vaccine and natural immunity (Beta, Kappa), but these mutations apparently strongly hurt the ability to spread, so much that these variants seem to decline naturally before reaching epidemic status.

LatteLazy• 5 years ago

The antiflee medicine my housemates cat gets is useless. Such is evolution and humans refusing to use medicines properly.

supperburg• 5 years ago

I have a friend who is normal but pretty dumb. We went to the dog park and he basically got on the ground and was mobbed with dogs. He was playing fetch with 50 dogs simultaneously. And he engaged each dog in a kind of primal way, establishing dominance and rough housing. He basically was a dog. It was beyond disgusting. For all the unbelievable suffering caused by my autism, I was glad to have my sensibilities that day — to not roll around in dog shit.

1123581321• 5 years ago

Was he surprised or something? That sounds unusual but fun. Just clean your clothes later.

There’s a family at our park that brings their teenaged boys and has them run around (standing up.) All the dogs chase them and have a great time, and the kids don’t bounce around the house as much the rest of the day.

WeAreWhatWeEat• 5 years ago

Sounds like your friend was having fun? Just take a shower after.

cupcake-unicorn• 5 years ago

This is somewhat shocking and isn't the full story. As another poster said, yeah, use Ivermectin (and to counter the same kind of posts about that - yes, I knew what ivermectin was before all this Covid stuff, and it's upsetting to me what's going on with kneejerk reactions once it's mentioned. For example it's used as a topical Rosacea med and many pts have switched to the livestock version just to save money. It has so many effects that we haven't even begun to investigate such as treating fatty liver disease and more.)

The other side of the story is that holistic treatments aren't junk. They work. If you go to a holistic vet you may get tips like putting diatomaceous earth in food - a trick livestock owners have done for years now. The DE is like tiny pieces of ground glass and physically hookworms and eggs are not going to have a good time with it. ( It's like using alcohol for bacteria in that way. There are studies showing this works (https://www.pjvas.org/index.php/pjvas/article/view/125/0) and pumpkin seeds rival antiparasitic meds (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22684690/) Papaya is also one that's been used forever (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03788...) Trust indigenous knowledge!

I'm really sick of these articles that have some sort of end of the world take on "drug resistance" and don't consider the fact that there are actual, science backed studies into alternative treatments that often work better but just don't have the same funding/research behind them versus studies here and there. If anyone works with animals or livestock and actually use these treatments though it will be no contest in a lot of cases. That doesn't mean ignoring the vet but that does mean when the vet is shrugging their shoulders like "Gosh it's just a crazy case of parasite resistance what can you do, these meds just aren't effective these days" that's not the full story and there are solutions out there. It's the same issue you see in mainstream medicine that you can't patent or get rich off of selling a pumpkin seed supplement for dogs so the narrative that this is just "woo woo hippy treatments" and they're just placebo is a useful one.

Anyone who's had livestock or a pet at the end of life and has been told some crap from the vet and taken matters into their own hands by researching treatments like medicinal mushrooms for dog cancer, supplements for chronic kidney disease in cats, and more, will tell you that there are so many cases where the vet's shrugging their shoulders and giving them a few months to live, and you can turn your pet around and give them a full recovery or at least a few more years of an active healthy life by researching and following evidence based studies on supplements that can alleviate these symptoms.

Dog parasite is developing resistance to treatments

Related Stories