My name is Sam Meisler and I am small animal veterinarian. Today, let us talk about scabies mange in dogs. Scabies is caused by an active parasite called Sarcoptes scabiei. It’s a skin mite. Scabies can cause an intense itchiness and a lot of skin issues. It also is highly contagious; it can be contagious to other pets in the household as well as human members of the household as well.
What are the symptoms? Again, itchiness but a particular pattern of itchiness is often seen. Usually it starts out on the distal extremities and that means the feet, tail, ear tips, that sort of thing and works its way up.
There will be hair loss where the dog is—on itself, others can have lesion sores that sort of thing, mainly from self trauma.
We try to diagnose it with at skin scraping. And what a skin scraping is, is we take a dog scalp away and scrape the surface of the skin, generally but firmly with a little mineral oil applied as well and see if we can pick up any mites and then we look at the slide under the microscope from that scraping. If we see mites, we definitely have a diagnosis.
Sometimes, the lymph nodes in the area are also enlarge that can give us a clue as well. If you don’t we see mites on the skin scraping, I don’t rule out scabies. There are many, many cases that are missed because we can’t find them on a skin scraping. So, if I have a recurrent skin condition that I often treat for scabies anyway and the treatment is really easy, there is a heartworm preventative let’s put on topically, you put it on two weeks apart, two days is two weeks apart and you can get rid of the scabies that way. So often when I have a recurrent skin itch, I’ll go ahead and treat anyway. But if your dog is intensely itchy, you’re finding, you’re not getting anywhere with the diagnosis then that maybe something to bring up you’re your veterinarian.
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