Does your dog have ticks? You should pay attention to certain diseases such as canine ehrlichiosis. Unfortunately, this disease is quite common in dogs that are not properly dewormed.
If your dog has been diagnosed by the vet with this disease or if you just want to know more, in this article of Animal Expert we explain everything you need to know about the canine ehrlichiosis by tick bite. Let’s go over the symptoms, clarify the diagnosis and what are the most recommended treatments.
- Canine ehrlichiosis is an infectious disease.
- Also known by other names such as: canine typhus.
- Canine hemorrhagic fever or tropical canine pancytopenia.
- Dogs are infected with this disease by the most common tick bite.
- The so-called brown tick (Rhipicephalus sanguineus).
The tick is a reservoir, that is, a carrier, of a bacterium called Erlichia canis (formerly called Rickettsia canis) and by biting the dog, the bacteria enters the dog’s bloodstream and will affect the immune system because it infects the white blood cells. .
Ticks bite dogs infected with Erlichia canis and keep these bacteria inside. They then transmit this bacteria to other healthy dogs through the bite. For this reason, it is so important that your puppy follows the deworming protocol defined by your trusted veterinarian. The tick not only transmits this disease, it also transmits others such as babesiosis, for example.
Any dog, regardless of breed or gender, can develop this disease. However, some studies indicate that German shepherd dogs are more sensitive.
Symptoms of canine ehrlichiosis depend on the type of how the disease develops, which may be acute, subclinical and chronic.
After the incubation period, after infection of the dog, which usually lasts between 8 and 20 days, the acute phase of the disease appears. At this stage, the bacteria proliferates within the cells and mainly affects the liver, spleen and lymph nodes. Most commonly, this phase will last between 2 and 4 weeks.
At this stage, the dog with canine erlquiosis may have the following symptoms:
Sometimes neurological symptoms of canine ehrlichiosis can occur as a result of meningitis. Bacteria-affected cells are transported to various parts of the dog’s body, including meninges. Therefore, severe tremors, ataxias and other neurological signals may occur.
In this second phase, the symptoms are not obvious and usually last between 6 and 9 weeks. That is, at this point, it will not be easy to observe any type of symptom in dogs. However, there are changes at the haematological level and can be detected by your veterinarian: thrombocytopenia, leukopenia and anemia.
If the dog’s immune system works properly, it will be a chronic carrier without symptoms. However, if the dog has symptoms of the disease, they will be similar to those of the acute phase but much more severe. You can see the dog with the following symptoms:
Only a veterinarian can make a correct diagnosis of canine ehrlichiosis. Diagnosing this disease is not always easy, as symptoms are similar to many other diseases. In any case, if your dog has a tick and any of the clinical signs, it may already indicate that it may be a disease.
Your veterinarian, after having a full physical exam and hearing the whole story (called anamnesis) you tell him, will do haematological tests to confirm it.
The main method of diagnosis is called blood smears. With this method, the veterinarian uses a drop of blood that he will observe under the microscope and confirms the presence of Erlichia canis. This method is the cheapest and the fastest but it is not always the most effective because as we mentioned, this bacteria circulates in the bloodstream and there may be no bacteria in this drop of blood but it does exist in the bloodstream. For this reason, there are other diagnostic methods your veterinarian may choose to use if he does not detect bacteria in the blood smear, such as chair polymer reaction (PCR) and indirect immunofluorescence (IFI).
For several decades, ehrlichiosis was believed to be “species-specific”, i.e. transmitted only within the same species. However, several different species of Ehrlichia have been found in humans and cases of human ehrlichiosis have increased in several countries and are therefore believed to have zoonotic potential. If your dog has canine ehrlichiosis, don’t worry, it won’t catch you.
In Brazil, human ehrlichiosis is fortunately rare
Treatment of canine ehrlichiosis depends on the stage your puppy is in. The main treatment, especially in the chronic phase, is a supportive treatment, in which the veterinarian uses fluid therapy and may even need to perform blood transfusions to compensate for the dog’s bleeding.
Combined with good supportive treatment, the veterinarian may administer several medicines to combat ehrlichiosis, mainly antibiotics, such as doxycycline. In addition, treatments should be performed for the associated symptoms.
Prevention is the main method to combat this disease, like all others. There is no vaccine for ehrlichiosis and the only way to prevent it is to make a good deworming protocol to avoid ticks.
If you adopt a new dog, it is important to keep it separate from other dogs until it is properly dewormed. This is one of the reasons why the quarantine of new dogs in the kennels is so important.
This article is for informational purposes only, in Animal Expert.com.br we cannot prescribe veterinary treatments or make any kind of diagnosis. We suggest that you take your pet to the veterinarian in case of any type of condition or discomfort.
If you would like to read articles similar to, we recommend that you visit our Parasitic Diseases section.