16 Jan | Posted by admin | no comments |
Yuck! Kittens do get worms in their guts, and they can affect both your kitten and you!
Intestinal parasites are very common in all kittens. They are passed onto them from their mother`s milk. Adult cats can carry them all their lives and stress such as pregnancy causes these parasites to come out of the female`s muscle mass and move into her milk. Since they are transmitted after birth, we need to keep up the treatment a little longer in kittens than in puppies who get their worms while they are still in the mother`s uterus. We recommend treating from 6 weeks of age until seven months. The medications we use to treat are very safe and very efficacious.
Why is this important? We live in very close proximity to our kittens these days. They often sleep with us, we pat them all the time. This does increase our risk of catching some parasites from our pets. . So it is very important that a good deworming program is in place to protect you and your family — that’s where we come in!
When you book your first appointment with your kitten, we will ask you to bring in a stool sample. We need about a 3cm sample of stool — put it in a ziplock or come in and get a container from us! We send this out to a laboratory where we can detect about 90 percent of the parasites that your kitten can carry. Since some of these parasites may require a different medication than our standard medication, stool analysis is important. So why do we deworm if the stool sample comes back negative Because 10 percent of the results are false negatives—the parasite might not be shedding eggs into the stool when the sample is taken. Therefore, we recommend deworming all kittens.
The new deworming medications are easy to give with very little side effects — many of our kitten patients gobble them up with no pressure from us. So please remember to bring in the poop! It is an important step in setting your kitten up for a long healthy life, while protecting you and your family from parasites as well!
