My name is Sam Meisler and I am a small animal veterinarian. Today, we’re going to talk about fleas in dogs. Fleas can cause disease in dogs; they are the primary vector for the tape worm. They can also cause disease in people. If you have a dog and cat household together, the flea can pick up certain bacteria from your cat and transfer to the human owner.
So fleas are very important to control. In addition, we see a lot of dogs that are allergic to fleas and this manifests itself in hair loss, itching, red lesions, sores, primarily around the top of the back, around the tail base, progressing upwards and then also progressing down the rear legs but some dogs will be itchy all over.
You can tell whether your dog has fleas by the pattern of distribution by seeing fleas obviously and sometimes seeing flea dirt. Flea dirt is essentially well, what we call flea poop. Flea dirt is made up of dried up blood from the dog. If you see little brown specks on your dog’s back, you can comb this brown specks onto a paper towel, wet the paper towel and you’ll see the dirt specks streaking red and that gives you secondary evidence that your dog has fleas.
That flea allergy itself is caused by your dog being allergic to the saliva of the flea. So, anything you can do to prevent the flea from biting will help your dog and there are a lot of very good products that can do this. This just gives you a general review of fleas in dogs. Talk to your veterinarian about what the best treatment would be.
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