so good morning and welcome to the second part of our webinar series called living with ticks this program is all about ticks and your beloved pets my name is lissa radke and i'm the community development educator at the uw madison's division of extension in the ashland county office this program is hosted by ashland county extension in the uw school of veterinary medicine in the department of medical sciences in madison first a bit of housekeeping we are recording this presentation and we will
post it in about seven days on the ashland county extension website you'll get a link to that website in a follow-up email that i'll send right after this program you're welcome to type your questions or comments in the chat box as we go along and we'll go through them as we talk with our speaker i'll also be putting several links in the chat throughout the program so you can find more information about this topic as we go before our speakers begin i have a short anonymous poll that will take ab
out a minute it's just four questions your demographic information that you share with me will help me ensure that our programs reach diverse audiences as required by our federal funders and partners so i'd appreciate it if you all would take just a moment to take this short poll huh we'll take about 10 more seconds thanks very much for taking the poll with us i'm just going to close it so why are we bringing you this program this morning wisconsin is an epicenter of tick-borne diseases in the u
nited states we have the fifth highest number of cases of infections in humans in a significant number of cases in dogs and cats even horses and farm animals have been known to be sickened by a tick disease so now that we've entered the prime time of the year for tick populations to emerge from their winter hibernations we thought it was a good time to renew our understanding of what ticks are biting our beloved four-legged friends and how we can prevent diagnose and treat infections i'm delight
ed to bring our speaker today dr amy nicholson dr nicholson is a doctor of veteran medic veterinary medicine in canine and feline practice at the university of wisconsin's school of veterinary medicine in the department of medical sciences in madison she's a relative newcomer to wisconsin having moved here in 2020 and in her free time she enjoys being outside in our wonderful state birding hiking and exploring the state she's currently a clinical assistant professor of primary care services and
she teaches vet students about how to care for canines and felines including managing tick diseases she's very busy with all of her work this summer so i feel really lucky that she could join us today welcome dr nicholson thank you so much so i'm really excited to be here today to talk to you a little bit about tick-borne diseases and your pets um so i'm going to go ahead and see if i can figure out how to share my screen give me just a minute it always seems easier when you're not and what i'd
like to do is have this be um i have some prepared slides but then i i'm sure that everybody has some questions um so kind of opening it up for some conversation as well to just make sure that everybody's thoughts are um and questions are answered and alyssa are you seeing the powerpoint um not yet okay let me see if i'm doing that how about now yes that's perfect perfect all right so without further ado so the main questions that people often have when they are looking at tick-borne diseases is
where are they prevalent and what kind of tics are prevalent in certain areas so um so this kind of gives you a map um and i took this from the american kennel club association and they have a tick prevalence map looking at the different types of tick um and they got that from the cdc and so in wisconsin you can see that the main ticks that we have to worry about are the brown dog tick the american dog tick and the deer tick which we'll talk a little bit more about but which is actually the bla
ck legged tick it's not a true deer tick but it just has that kind of misnomer that we recognize and so we kind of keep with that and all of these ticks can transmit disease so the um the most common tick-borne disease that i think we think about is lyme disease because of its effect on humans and our pet population and that's transmitted by the black-legged tick or the deer tick as we call it anaplasma can also be transmitted by the black-legged tick although it can also be transmitted by the d
og tick and then the lone star tick can share um anaplasma along with erlickia and some rocky mounted spotted fever but we don't tend to see rocky amount of spotted fever in this area so the big three in wisconsin are going to be lyme disease followed by anaplasma followed by erlichia but the reason that i like this um diagram is you can see i have them kind of zoomed in here um and they're a little bit blurry as they're zoomed in but just so you can see the ticks the um and then you have the ru
ler on the side and then i zoomed it out so over here you can see where it's actually one inch and so these are how big the ticks are going to be in real life and you can see that again on this finger here the different stages so larval nymphal it looks like i got muted oh i'm sorry amy uh you're okay now okay did you guys hear everything that i said or do i need to recap anything um you were talking about the larval stage okay perfect thank you so the the larval the nymphal and then the adults
um so the different sexes are different sizes and the reason that's important is you can see how tiny they are and at this stage they can start transmitting lyme disease they can start transmitting anaplasma um so you can and i think that's the number one way that humans actually get lyme disease is through nymphal bites um because we don't see them so if you don't see them how do you take them off and so um it's important when you're looking for ticks and you're and you're scouring your pets to
recognize that they can be quite small in terms of areas that are going to be at risk for ticks we're thinking high brushy areas um areas with lots of humidity the right season right so so another key factor is we typically think of of ticks being more prevalent in the spring summer and fall and that's true um but they can be active anytime that the ground is above freezing so we can see tick activity if the ambient temperature is over 40 degrees fahrenheit and that becomes important when we lo
ok at whether or not we should be providing flea and tick prevention year round or seasonally and so a lot of times we're going to recommend year-round prevention because of the concern that any time you know there's times in february we'll get over 40 degrees and your your animals are at risk so so we do recommend year-round prevention and then if you're having landscapes like this can we cut back the brush can we create a tick-free zone um to protect your animals um and the reason is that tick
s love to do this questing behavior so they'll go up onto the tallest branch or on the tallest shrub and they'll just hang out there waiting for something to pass them and then they just grab on and then they climb so anything that provides altitude will increase tick exposure and then if we look at prevalence we say okay well lyme disease anaplasma and or licky are the most common tick-borne diseases we see in wisconsin there's a really nice website that i can put in the chat there we go um tha
t you can look at your county so i did ashland county since that's the extension that we're presenting with today but if you're not from ashland county you can take the look and say okay for these different diseases um what is the prevalence in my county out of the animals tested and so this provides a really nice resource you can also look for heartworm disease or other infectious diseases if you're interested and so and actually honey you can see that the prevalence of lyme disease in our five
percent um and a plasma is four point four percent and our likia is zero point four five percent so um and you can see kind of as a heat map so so based on prevalence throughout wisconsin you can see kind of the prevalence of these diseases throughout wisconsin um so if you're traveling if you're you know in dane county and you travel up north a lot you know that may influence how you prevent um tick borne infections and how you if you consider vaccinating and things like that and we'll talk ab
out that so i think that's kind of a nice resource and then tick prevention here we talk about the questing behavior again you see our little tick ready to climb on so if we can avoid high risk areas we should uh certainly that's not always possible we have these hunting dogs that go out into high brush go running if you live on acreage you know that's not always possible to avoid high-risk areas um but if you can create a tick-free zone that can be helpful cutting down shrubs and grass by the h
ome things like that always check your animal even if they're on prevention you should always check for ticks if you're seeing them on you you should check your animal and removing them promptly can really help reduce the risk of infection and there's a lot of different ways to remove a tick the key is you don't want to heat them you don't want to alcohol them you want to either use a forcep and pull them straight out or my favorite is like these little tick removal hooks you just kind of put th
e um the opening through the head of like around the head of the tick and you just kind of rotate and pull at the same time and that seems to be a really easy way um not very awkward to get these ticks off and they're like four bucks um so for me like that's what we have at our vet hospital um to help remove um remove ticks and if we're catching them soon we can get them before they're engorged and before they can transmit disease and anytime you're removing a tick you just want to use proper hy
giene if you were to squish a tick or or get contaminated there would be a risk to you so always make sure you're you know using gloves or or hand washing after and trying to minimize um you know trauma to the tick is gonna minimize your trauma as well and i think before we start well we can talk about the signs of tick-borne diseases um in dogs because it is interesting it's a little bit different than the signs in humans and so i think that's important to remember in humans we always think abo
ut that bullseye lesion which is you know scientific name is erythema migraines but we rarely ever see that in dogs and dogs we see you know limping we see a painful swollen hot joints we'll see maybe that they're just not acting right they've got a fever they're they've got enlarged lymph nodes they may have bruising um little pinpoint bruises called peticiation and they may just not be acting well so the signs can be relatively vague and so when you're looking for those signs you know you say
okay i have these vague signs coupled with you know uh if you're in an environment where the risk is higher or you've seen ticks on your animal in the previous three to six weeks you know that would all be information that you'd want to say okay it's time to go to my veterinarian and i want to let them know that i have had exposure my dog has had exposure to ticks um and see if we need to be tested so i think at this point i have a few more slides but what i'd like to do is just kind of see what
kind of questions we have i know that alyssa had some questions as well to kind of help direct um the next parts of this discussion sure amy that's a great um start up for us to give some good background information about what ticks are out there where they might be living how they attach to our dog i've seen ticks doing that questing behavior and it's really a little bit creepy um but they are extremely tiny up where we live near brule and you mentioned that nymph stage and i just wanted to as
k you are the tiny ticks at that size still able to be infected with the bacteria or is it just the adult ticks that have a infection yeah i think that's a really great uh question and so i pulled up this is the life cycle of a tick so of an exotic scapularis tick and so most ticks have multiple lifestyles and they have to be they can't transmit lyme disease from like mom to baby um in the in the tig world right but but they have to be exposed to it but they're exposed to it usually when they're
hatched into larva over here and so you can see here that in this nymphal stage they actually become infective so yes at the nymphal stage at that second to smallest size they are they can be infected not to say they have to be but they can have an harbor borreliosis which is the target of agent of lime so if you come back here so right at this stage they can be infected it's pretty incredible because i've seen photographs of a poppy seed muffin and and i think it came from the cdc and they've
put five tiny nymphs on a top of a poppy seed muffin and you can barely find the five ticks so i want to just emphasize your message that these tiniest hard to see ticks can also carry disease so we really have to look when we're doing a tick check and maybe we could talk about that tick check is there a good way to do that or are there little secret places that these ticks like to climb into that we might be missing when we're checking our pets yeah so any kind of warm humid environment is wher
e a tick likes to be um so so eyelids ears like so inside the ear i would look in there um the gum line under the collar tends to be a common place where we miss because they have dogs where their collar all the time um or a lot of times they do and so checking under the collar can be a nice hiding place genital area so my personal dog got a tick on her vulva um so always checking in those kind of more private areas um can be important as well well thank you for saying that i never thought to ch
eck his gums but that makes sense that that would be the warm moist area that you say that they prefer yeah i wanted to welcome folks to either type their own questions into the text or the chat box or feel free to raise your hand using the button at the bottom of your screen and i'm happy to call on you and unmute you linda says in the chat that lone star ticks can cause people to develop an allergy to red meat is that the same thing for pets as well that has not been i would say that we don't
know i don't know that that's been specifically studied or targeted but in general allergies to red meat are incredibly uncommon in in dogs so um not that i'm aware of okay and let's go back to some of these preventative um strategies at you know things that we can do to prevent the the animal from coming into the house with um any tick on it um there's a manual extraction it sounds like and then also sort of a chemical barrier so um we need to be on the lookout for ticks every month of the year
as you said um i've heard of horses being infected in february so even though there's a lot of snow in the ground from what you've uh said to us it sounds like we should really be giving a once-over throughout the whole year yeah um so certainly you know what we talked about in terms of prevention was largely like manual removal but we should certainly um talk about other options that we have for prevention as well um and we do recommend year-round prevention so year-round screening for ticks e
specially if they have a high exposure they're going through that high brush and have easy access to that we also recommend year-round flea tick prevention and typically what that entails is some form of topical or oral preventative measure that you give once a month or once every three months depending on the product to help prevent um the tick infections and so how you know an oral would work is that the tick has to bite to to get um the medication which then kills the tick but it works so qui
ckly um whenever a tick bites in order to transmit lyme disease it has to be attached for about 24 to 48 hours before it can transmit the disease um and so it kills it before it can do that there are other products like the topicals that contain permethrins that will actually repel ticks so for peltics and if a tick were to bite through that repellent it would kill the tick as well um the downside of those is it's topical so if you have a cat in the house cats prometheans are toxic to cats um so
if your cat's doing any grooming of dogs that can be a problem but also if you're bathing your dog a lot or they're swimming a lot um we may lose some efficacy in that way um and then there's also collars so the ceresto collar really good efficacy and lacks or lasts for about nine months um it just has to have really good skin contact sometimes we leave it a little too loose and then it can't do its job yeah that's really an important thing to know i i'm kind of in a mini discussion with my par
tner about vaccines and these chemical barriers is it safe to have a vaccine and give them these monthly or treatments either a chewy tablet tablet or the topical that you described is it safe to do both it absolutely is safe to do both um the only vaccine that we have to help combat tick-borne diseases is for lyme so there's a lyme vaccine available but there's no anaplasma or likia vaccine um and largely we we tell clients that they the number one thing you can do to prevent lyme disease is to
have your dog on year round prevention for flea and ticks so so some form of flea and tick prevention the the vaccine can be used in addition in endemic areas to help reduce the risk but we know that the vaccine is similar to any other vaccine is not 100 protective the best ways to kill the tick before it can transmit the disease um there can be side effects of the vaccine although very rare um and so we usually use the vaccine as an addition in animals that are endemic areas to help provide ad
ditional support but the number one thing that we can do is be on around fleeting prevention fascinating and then i heard from a vet um on the radio that even though you have the vaccine and you're using the um monthly chemical barriers you should still get your pet tested once a year for tick-borne illnesses you're shaking your head do you yeah so depend again like all of this is contingent on where you live right um but if you live in an area that has a high prevalence you know six percent for
ashland county of lyon disease we certainly would recommend every year testing um and the reason we do that is that a lot of animals are asymptomatic a lot of animals are asymptomatic for these diseases and so for lyme disease that may not be a big deal but for other diseases they can harbor it and then they can become very very sick and so if we can catch it early and screen for some of those things that can make them very very sick we can treat it really well and we can treat it very effectiv
ely and then that can also if they have lyme disease allow us to look for things that we won't necessarily look for to make sure that we're not seeing some of the more serious equal of lyme disease so in our area in dane county we have a lower prevalence so sometimes if they're on year-round support we'll say okay you know we can do every two years if they're not on year-round support every year we're testing and if they're in a high prevalence area around wisconsin every year we're testing to m
ake sure that they haven't developed one of the tick-borne diseases or heartworm so that's just a really excellent thorough comprehensive check way to make sure that you're preventing as well as you can and then checking to see that you've caught everything exactly good care um linda says that her dogs get the lyme vaccine i had one dog that tested positive for lyme even though she was vaccinated does the vaccine generally have good efficacy throughout the year or does it wane before the next on
e-year booster that's a great and loaded question linda so so yes the vaccine is effective it's not a hundred percent so i'm not surprised that unfortunately your dog tested positive for lyme and it's important to remember that the lyme test is an antibody test so it tests for exposure so it doesn't tell us that they're infected it tells us that they were exposed to lyme um so so i think that's a important delineator so even if they're positive they're going to be positive for a long time someti
mes forever and that doesn't mean that they are still sick or that they ever were sick um in general we know that the vaccine in most cases lasts for about a year but in in some studies they found that depending on the individual immune response it may not be as effective at certain time frames so in one study you know some dogs became sick 22 weeks into their into their booster and so there's a lot of debate on whether or not the lyme vaccine should be boosted at six months again um or given ye
arly or or you know the consistency and it probably honestly similar to humans has to do with the individual's response to that vaccine um but we don't have good titers or anything like that for lying where we could check and say okay your titus shows that you are protected so so it is better than nothing in a highly endemic area like i think it's something that can be considered but we certainly shouldn't hold our hang our hat on it right we should use our other preventative measures that we kn
ow are effective that we know really help reduce the burden and that has been proven in many many studies um to help reduce the risk and then use the vaccine as a as an additive to that sure that makes total sense um there's a question from keslin about how effective is nexgard is in preventing ticks that must be a brand name yeah that's an it's a brand name um and the the main ingredient in next guard the broad category of that is an isoxazoline and that's the main ingredient or type of drug in
neck scars and parka credelio brebecto and all of those have been shown to be very effective at preventing um tick-borne transmissions so again they have to bite so it doesn't prevent them from getting ticks but it will prevent tick-borne diseases and um and they work very quickly so within about four hours they're killing those chicks four to eight hours that's amazing um wayne's got some questions about natural remedies have you heard of any natural remedies that prevent sex illnesses illness
es yeah so there's been a lot of of proposed natural remedies and i think that i've seen them all in terms of you know diatomaceous earth and and uh and essential oils and things like that and most of them um don't seem to be very effective i see a lot of animals that come in with some of these natural remedies and they still have fleas or they still have ticks um some of them can be harmful so that's i think where you know where we need to focus our understanding is a lot of people will use thi
ngs that we understand or take preventatives like essential oils like cinnamon oil or clove oil um and when you look at the aspca poison control one of the most common reasons that people call in with toxicities is because of the essential oil exposure for dogs and cats and what happens is that we apply it topically and the animal either licks it off or it's absorbed through their skin and it can cause really bad effects ranging from vomiting lethargy drooling um you know uh tremors things like
that and so um a lot of times we rely on these more natural methods because we feel like they're safer but in a lot but these are still medications and so we need to be aware of the side effects of those and especially especially in cats they're really really sensitive to certain triggers like that um and just be aware of that if we're using something that's natural i've heard of putting brewers yeast on dogs food because somehow it makes them less palatable to all kinds of bugs mosquitoes fleas
ticks i don't know if that's at all true but brewer's yeast is a like a b vitamin in a powdered form that may or may not work it could be a live scale i don't know i know i think that's one of them like i think all of us are open to the idea of some kind of you know natural additive being helpful at reducing the risk of of contracting certain diseases but just like in us you know there's a lot of people that are getting birds yeast as a supplement and they we still get to fight you know so i do
n't think if it does work it's not at the level of saying like this is going to eliminate it you know they've done i was mentioning to alyssa before this that they did some like abbreviated studies looking at like turmeric oil and orange oil and found that like turmeric oil maybe reduced the risk of tick attachment but again like against significance that wasn't really found and in orange oil there was no difference in tick attachment so we can use these as like additives but they should but fir
st we need to make sure they're not toxic because a lot of these anima these uh nutraceuticals and natural and beans can actually hurt our animals um and then we need to make sure like is it working and so if you try something like that if you try brewer's yeast if you try diatomaceous earth and you're seeing ticks say oh okay like i probably need to try something different and now i need to make sure that my dog is tested because they haven't been on a known preventative and that might be true
for um wayne's question about spraying a pet with garlic or feeding garlic to a pet not enough research on that yet definitely not enough research but we do know that actually garlic like orally is toxic to cats and dogs so um garlic and onions are toxic and so we try to avoid any of those in our in our food for those animals oh that's interesting um linda wonders if you can spray off on your pets or not with deep how about feet nope nope good question those should be avoided for for on dogs and
cats for sure um so they can be toxic so um yeah so any of that kind of um spray that we use on us we would not use on on animals um certainly you know um one of the things that we use for us would be like promethean soaked clothing um to help prevent um tick bites and we use promethean in some of our topical preventatives for dogs and cats so that would be okay but for for um but those are veterinary approved products at a dose that we understand versus kind of off or deep where these animals
i mean they lick themselves you can't stop them from doing that and that could be very toxic to them yeah that's a great point it's so easy to think well something works on us our family members our kids so it's okay for the dog but i can see where those things could be really toxic especially in doses that we might use in ourselves you know spray your arms and legs could really hurt an animal right and we forget like for us we don't groom ourselves you know we don't we don't ingest what we appl
y topically and and for animals we have to take that into account when we're looking at a topical is that they may ingest that and how will that interact so um i'm wondering um this might be beyond just a vet question but we have vaccines for our pets have you heard of any similar kind of prevention for humans was there ever a vaccine for a tick-borne illness for humans i think there was and this is a little bit out of my my realm so um i would definitely take that with a grain of salt but i thi
nk there was a lime vaccine for humans that got taken off of the market um several years ago ago and i'm not sure why or um but i believe that there was and i do believe that they're looking at future vaccines for lyme disease um and on the human side as well but i'm not sure where they're coming with that in terms of oral preventions or like topical preventions um there's nothing out there that's similar to what we use for dogs and and part of that is a lot of our our research has been in topic
als and obviously we bathe a lot more than even the most bathed dog bathes and so topicals become very difficult at um because we wash them off but we do use like the parmesan soaked clothing the topicals like deet um that for humans um that can be helpful at preventing the transmission of tick bites okay and i imagine uh we can't give our pets certain things that we take as humans um humans should not take the pets preventive tablets correct that's a given right that is a given yes and um yeah
someday maybe there will be some kind of prevention for it for humans similar to what we have in dogs but right now there's no studies showing uh safety or efficacy of our the oral tablets that we give for dogs being used in humans so we would definitely not encourage that okay well let's talk about some of the symptoms that we might look you showed a slide of some of the things i know i had a dog previously who had a tick-borne illness and the symptoms were so subtle that really all we could te
ll was that she was kind of lackadaisical and not eating that much so can you go through some of those symptoms again and like when we should really get in to see our vet and have a test yeah and that's the frustrating part list is that the signs like either either sometimes there's no signs right you just happen to do your routine screening and you're like oh my dog has anaplasma and and they can have blood derangements because of it and they won't show signs because dogs are amazing um but som
e of the signs that we may expect to see is exactly what you're describing is that they're just not themselves they're a little bit lethargic maybe they're a little stiff if you check the temperature they may be febrile or have a fever but the signs can be quite vague um typically like the the typical signs that we often see with especially lyme disease is going to be a shifting leg lameness so they'll be lame on their right front and then they're kind of limping on their left back and you're li
ke what's going on here you're like oh maybe they injured it but then it's a different leg the next day and that's very typical of a tick-borne disease so if you saw that you that would be a hallmark to say hey you know vet this is what i'm seeing should we be testing for something but otherwise the signs can be very vague and so that's where it's really important to come into your vet and and indicate exposure especially if you don't if your vet isn't in a highly endemic area but you travel to
highly endemic areas it's really important to let your vet know hey i go up to ashland i go up to northern uh wisconsin or i travel around state to areas where this is higher prevalence i'm not on year-round prevention like should we be screening for this um and so that can be really helpful as you're building a relationship and a team with your vet to just kind of make sure everyone's on the same page with exposure risk and i think that's a really important point that up in the northern part of
wisconsin we might be pretty familiar with czech-born illnesses and our vets are probably familiar but visitors who come here and then go back to their own state might not be as familiar and this could be pretty perplexing for a veterinarian veterinarian to see these sort of mild symptoms and not know what to even look for absolutely you know i came from as you mentioned california and we don't have lyme disease there and so it was really important if we had a case you know that came from new j
ersey or something like that we'd have to say okay you know maybe we need to be screening for this because they have a higher exposure um where they were um and it's the same thing wherever you're traveling you know whatever state may have a different prevalence of different diseases um so you just want to make sure that if you're doing any traveling with your pet that you're letting your vet know where you're traveling and i assume that um once a pet is infected and treated and seems to be back
to normal they can still be reinfected again either with the same disease or a completely different one that's yeah it is true there's unfortunately there's no protective immunity after they get um especially for lyme disease there's no protective immunity um for lyme and part of it is how the the organism works and how it shields itself and keeps itself protected from the environment um and that's part of the reason in you know going back to that question about vaccines you know um there's no
learned immunity and so that's why they need to keep getting their boosters every year and that's why if they have become lying positive even if you know they still have antibodies they can still become re-line infected and so even if they have had lyme disease they still need to be on their preventions you could still consider if they're healthy and they don't have some of the complications of lyme disease you could still consider vaccinating them so once a pet is found to be positive for one o
f these infections what kind of treatments can we expect our vet might prescribe for our dogs or cats yeah so it really varies um what i would say is that the first thing the first question that any vet has to ask is is are we finding that your dog was or cat was exposed or do we think that your dog or cat was infected and so if they were just exposed to lyme disease and we screen them for some of the diseases and complications that come with lyme disease and those are normal we may do nothing w
e may do nothing and say your dog was exposed but it doesn't look like they were infected that they they went uh they got through scot-free if there were signs of infect infections such as you know we did a urine test and there was protein loss in the urine or we did um you were anaplasma positive and we ran a blood screening that showed that there were organisms or there were derangements in our our protective immunity or our white blood cells then we would recommend doing a course of antibioti
cs um and those antibiotics just like any antibiotic as soon as i say antibiotics in humans we think oh gi upset and vomiting and diarrhea and that can happen but it's pretty uncommon um you know we give it with food and it tends to be well tolerated um and we do the antibiotics for a specific period of time depending on which tick-borne disease we are worried about and them being infected with um and usually they respond really well that's fascinating it i know for humans it's recommended if yo
u're on antibiotics that you take some yogurt or some probiotics is that similar with the dog to alleviate some of the side effects yeah yeah so so in general we try to steer away from yogurt um just because they have a different population of bacteria than we do and a lot of dogs are actually lactose intolerant and so sometimes that alone can cause some gi upset so then you're like is it the yogurt or is it the antibiotic but certainly we do encourage um people to to start their animals on a pr
obiotic and there's a lot of veterinary probiotics that are available and usually we'll recommend a veterinary approved one just because similar to the human side um in products that are not fda regulated we don't know what's actually in them if it's the bacteria they say if it's at the population they say and so having a product that has some internal um source control um is helpful for that but yes i can absolutely help kind of keep the good bacteria present and populated while we're using an
antibiotic that's great to know and and how long does it take for pets to recover so usually it's pretty quickly so depending and again it depends on in some cases the body kind of responds to the infection and has like an over dramatic response and you get kind of an immune reaction and that can be a little bit harder to treat in a little bit longer course of treatment um but if you have just an antibiotic response of tick-borne disease usually they're going to be feeling better in a few days u
m and then we kind of have a longer course usually 14 to 28 days depending of antibiotics to kind of keep them supported so at that point it's really important to keep taking the antibiotic even though your pet looks better feels better eating again but still you need to have that full course to actually kill the full infection absolutely and then if your dog you know had a secondary immune reaction to that infection then then that's a different ordeal in terms of the treatment that we would rec
ommend and the follow-up that would be needed but for your typical you know just the lyme disease your body didn't overreact to it that's what we'd be looking at okay feel free to keep putting your questions and comments in the chat or raise your hand and we'll unmute you sarah says that her dog tested positive for anaplasma and every year since the vet recommends that they do a blood test and the blood to see if the blood disease hasn't affected his blood cell count that also wants to give him
antibiotics for it every year even though the pet shows no symptoms so should sarah really get the blood tested and antibiotics given every year as sort of prevention it sounds like hmm that's that's a hard one it's really hard kind of coming into a a case and not being able to see the full picture um so so i guess i would say you know i would trust your vet if they're saying that you know um i think that or at least have a conversation say like you know why are we doing this every year um in ge
neral we will absolutely screen animals if they are still anaplasma positive and say okay let's make sure because again if you're testing for exposure we don't know if they're re-infected or if they're still just having residual exposure um and so by using those more confirmatory blood tests we can tell more about whether or not this animal is showing signs of infection versus re-exposure versus reinfection that got confusing um so so that can help us really decide that same thing with lyme dise
ase we will usually if an animal is lying positive even every six months say we should be checking your urine and making sure that we're not seeing signs of kidney damage um through your urine even if they've never been showing signs of sickness before because it can develop either because of the immune response to it over time you know we think of in humans with chronic issues with lyme disease that can build up over time um or because again we don't have protective immunity and so can we have
been reinfected with anaplasma and now we're showing some blood arrangements because of that that we caught early and so we were able to treat with antibiotics so it's it's super case dependent and it's in the frustrating thing is really delineating between infection reinfection re-exposure this is where um veterinary science becomes sort of veterinary art too you're balancing you know your intuition and the dog's history it's not just dealing with one illness you're really looking at the whole
picture of that pet's life cycle so to speak yeah exactly and you're weighing the pros and cons right what is the con of missing something and having your dog get really really sick versus what is the benefit of early routine screening and so that's always the dance that we're making with our clients is is you know what is your exposure risk what is your dog's risk how do we balance that well and sarah follows up by saying her vet says it's up to her every year on how to treat that dog with test
s and antibiotics and that it sounds like if the blood test comes back okay there may not be a need for antibiotic therapy yeah i think that you know if if the blood test comes back okay we know that um that's the main way that we have clinical signs of anaplasma and so if we're not showing signs of active infection then i think it's fair to continue monitoring for those signs but otherwise you know you may not need to treat unless you developed those signs and i imagine in terrible cases where
pets aren't um their illness isn't addressed in time that they can actually die from a tick-borne illness absolutely um especially you know lyme we think of all the chronic stuff right and we think of all the immune mediated and all the you know like in humans lyme nephritis or kidney infections associated with lyme disease um anaplasma more directly affects the the white blood cell count and so it can make you unable to fight infections it can make you more likely to bleed um it can make you an
emic and so those side effects can be much more serious um and again if you're screening for it and looking for it you can easily treat it it's probably easier to treat than than lyme disease um in terms of the lack of the chronic manifestations that we associate with lyme disease um but you need to to be looking for it get it in time yeah um linda asks are older or younger dogs more susceptible to disease symptoms actually developing or does age or health not play into that the only way so that
's a great question and i think the nuances are are unstudied so um but what would be something that would be a uh that would play a role would be the activity level of those dogs so if you're seeing like a 13 year old a 15 year old dog they probably aren't going out hunting they probably aren't going out and exposing themselves the same way that a two-year-old labrador is gonna be out doing things that and getting into high brush and having more tick exposure um than an older dog so in that sen
se the exposure risk is going to be heightened um certainly when they're really young you know they're still building up their immune response and so so um in terms of response to vaccines and expos in terms of response to infection that may be a little bit skewed a little bit delayed but otherwise there should be no real difference in terms of how these animals contract the disease besides their exposure risk that's good to know we've got about um 10 more minutes left so i encourage you to keep
putting questions in the chat or um let me know and i will unmute you um i wanted to take another question from sarah that she has read that anaplasma can go away on its own is that true and do you know how long you could expect a dog to carry the disease if he were not reinfected in the future that's the million-dollar question because we screen every year and they'll be positive and then suddenly they're not they're suddenly they're not positive anymore they become negative and that can vary
it can be five years it can be seven years it can be two years it can be never um and and that's a the difference between having an animal that still has antibodies against a disease you know they they probably still don't have anaplasma we just don't know because we can't test for it um but but they still have antibodies to it so they're still testing positive on the test um at some point a lot of these dogs will become antibody negative but we just can't predict when that will happen or if it
will happen and i wanted to ask you um there's a tick app and i'm going to put a link to it in the um chat box that you we can download free on our phones that help researchers figure out where exactly people are getting infected does the tick app also work for our pets in terms of um reporting to this big statewide database about what's getting infected where yeah i think that there is a um a dog section on that app and and it also is helpful at kind of figuring out how do i take off a tip from
a dog some of those basics that we covered but i think it has some of that information as well and it helps we know that un unfortunately humans are more likely to be exposed to tick-borne diseases when they're having dogs that are exposed to tick-borne diseases and it's not because the the dog is infectious to the human right and it's not because the tick that attached to the dog is infectious to the human like it's not like zoonotic in that way it's not like but it's because you're exposed to
the same population of ticks um so if your dog has a higher prevalence they're bringing in ticks on them you're gonna have a higher prevalence because you're exposed to those ticks um so the tick app can help you kind of keep track of the area and say okay i'm exposed to this tick uh my dog was exposing kind of you know what to keep an eye on um and so i think that's really valuable and it provides really valuable data um i think that the tick app is looking at like university of wisconsin illi
nois um is it minnesota i think there's a section in minnesota also yeah and so you're getting kind of a community of people all taking part in this and saying okay i found this tick on my dog let me report it i found this tick on me let me report it and so we're getting a really more centralized idea of of the tick burden in our areas so i think if you're willing to do it they have like a little tick diary area you can fill out i think it's a really great way to to participate in making sure th
at we are as knowledgeable at knowing what's going on in our environment as possible because only then can we really know how best to prevent it you know that's an excellent point and really it um and expands the reach of the researchers who are looking at this because there's so many of our eyes out in the field in our backyards and we're seeing all this and we're sending that information into the researchers who can draw better conclusions about where these ticks are and what they're doing and
that makes me wonder if there's a place that veterinarians have to record infections anywhere to a state database or anything like that it depends on the infection but for these common tick-borne diseases there's not so so when we look at the um the website that checks prevalence that's directed from a laboratory that takes in a lot of our testing and so they're able to to provide that information to get like a global assessment of risk for our dogs but we're not required to report it to like a
public health lab okay and um i had one other question too um are there any resources that you re recommend for us as pet caretakers that we might go to for more information i did put a link into the school of veterinary medicine that you've got a lot of resources on your website but are there any other things that you might recommend for us yeah i think that's a great um resource the other resource that i kind of put in and i can see if i can share my screen i think it's super fun that also is
probably the nerd in me um but um i go to the capc website all the time and i will often go like if i have a client that's plotting a trip they're going i'm going to north carolina and then i'm going down and we'll just like track the counties that they're going to and look at prevalence of diseases um let me see if i can show this but um i think it's really fun and i think it also can kind of give you if you're looking at you know you're talking about okay do i need to test every year do i nee
d to treat every year do i need to um prevent every year um this gives you some more kind of knowledge to help you decide that it helps you fuel you the veterinary art right um we can say okay we know this is an art but let's look let's try to make it as data driven as we can um so let me go to share screen okay and are you seeing the capc website yes big beautiful map perfect yes and so you can see it globally right if you're traveling to texas you can look at different prevalences but it also
tells you heartworm intestinal parasites tick-borne diseases viral diseases for cat and dog and so i can say okay i want to look at tick-borne diseases and you can look at lyme anaplasma or likia and then you can kind of go by by map so you can say okay if i'm in wisconsin where are my risks depending on county if i want to look at oh oh new let's see oh it has like a nice forecasted uh prevalence of lyme disease which is probably very applicable to this talk so you can look at the forecast of w
here they think because the other thing is depending on climate right we see ticks move and become active in different areas at different levels and so um looking at um and that can be very helpful too and i think that's where that tick app that lisa put in the app in the chat can be really helpful as well but you can go through and say okay what is my true risk factor for each of these diseases and right now my computer's freezing but um but i think that's really helpful right yeah you can look
at like all the uh preventative plan for this that's a really great idea and um did we put that link to that website earlier i think so but i can put it back in just in case since i know that the chat has been um going perfect and i will put in these links into a follow-up message in an email that i'll send to everybody after the event but um i don't know if people know this if you want to save the chat contents on your own computer you open your chat box and go to the very bottom where you cou
ld start a new message and you'll see a little smiley face all the way to the right and then you'll see three horizontal dots and if you click on those horizontal dots you can see the word save chat and just click on save chat and now you've got all those resources saved on your own computer so it's a nice little tip when you're watching a webinar and you find some great stuff you want to learn more about we've got a few more questions before we end um i use a topical tick medication on my dog a
nd he swims almost daily in the summer do you think applications every 28 days is sufficient to cover him yeah that's a great question um and it depends um i don't know sir if you mind kind of providing what kind of topical tic medication you you use some of them are water resistant um and some say that they're waterproof but we do know that even with the water resistant if they're if they're swimming a lot um that can reduce the efficacy canine advantage too perfect and that one's a nice one be
cause it's got a promethean in it too so it's got repellent characteristics um which is nice um you just want to make sure no cat is is grooming them having worked er for several years that's like i'm like don't get the cats don't create toxicity for cats um but you may see a loss of efficacy you may if he's bathing or if he's swimming that frequently so if you're starting to notice that ticks are attaching remembering that the advantage should be a a repellent and a killer um so if you're seein
g them attaching then that would be a sign to me that the advantage is not doing its job um and you could even consider giving it more frequently um or seeing do i need to combine it with something different um so so your vet can help you make that decision if you go with more frequent or if you add a different medication but if you're seeing good effect then it may still be effective because it should be water resistant but you're putting it through a pretty heavy load if you're if he's swimmin
g every day yeah just like us in sunscreen imagine you just re reduce the overall efficacy yeah and it is absorbed into the bloodstream through the the follicles um but even then because it is a depot it lasts a long time um the frequent bathing can affect the results okay thanks um question about whether we should wear tick collars around ankles i would i don't have a clear answer but i would hedge towards not um because we just don't know how these are going to work on humans the studies haven
't been done and if we extrapolate from one species like a dog to a cat or a cat to a dog like that's my world so that's what i can speak to we know that there can be toxicity across species even if something's really safe for a dog it can be very harmful to a cat and so i would stick with what we know in terms of topical preventions for humans and and not try to risk it okay thanks we've just got about two minutes left um i put a link to a short anonymous evaluation about the program in the cha
t and we're asking you mainly um what did you learn today and what else would you like to learn so i encourage everybody to give some feedback so helps me plan more programs in the future um let's do one more question amy i'm constantly weighing topical versus oral applications i like that the topical repels as well as tip kills it sounds like most vets say oral tick prevention is more effective overall what do you think yeah i think i mean really again great question um the orals do seem to be
more effective especially in terms of kill time so they're just so much faster um if you're looking at i know you're on um advantix but when you're looking at some of the um like fipronil derivatives you know it can take 12 hours to 24 hours to kill a tick um and so while that should be fine for lyme disease anaplasma can transmit more quickly um and so are we proposing or are putting them at risk if we have a slow kill time on a tick so so that would be a concern and like honestly sometimes wha
t i've done in and it depends again on the case um in a case by case basis but you know um sometimes i'll even alternate so i'll have them on a repellent and an oral and i'll switch off every couple weeks and and in california where we had really resistant flea issues um we would that's kind of how we would manage it so that we could get the tick properties and get a really good flea product um since some of the topicals in california don't work because of the flea issues um so it's hard because
i agree i love the idea of repelling ticks like why would you want them in your environment why would you even want them to have a chance to attach i can definitely see the appeal of that um it just becomes concerning if they're not as effective and in some cases if we're if we're putting them through the ringer in terms of bathing or swimming so frequently um if we have a footprint based product that that um has a slower kill time you know we're making it harder for the for the drug to do its
job well this has been so informative dr amy nicholson i really appreciate you being here the main takeaways i'm hearing are to minimize your exposure in habitats where we have learned ticks are more prevalent check them as often and as carefully as we can provide some chemical barriers to their to infections taking hold by either putting topicals or vaccines or a monthly medications and be alert to your pets overall demeanor and health so that if they do start to act a little bit unusual you ca
n detect it earlier get your pet to a vet and let he or she take over with the diagnosis and a treatment yeah i think yeah for me i think that's a perfect summary what's that and and for me i think if i wanted you guys to get one thing out of this it's stay on a preventative year-round if you can um it's just so important that's the number one thing you can do um to prevent tick-borne diseases check your pets daily um especially if they're in a high-risk environment and communicate that risk wit
h your vet so if you're noticing those odd signs just you know it's so hard sometimes for us to to know all the nuance of what your dog is doing in its everyday life so having you come in and say oh he's he's doing a lot of swimming every day oh he's he's traveling to louisiana twice a year all of that can be so informative to help us target a plan for you and your pet well this has been fantastic i know i've learned a lot i appreciate you being here um good luck with all your teaching and your
practice this summer and thanks to everybody else for joining us it was great to have you along and have so many wonderful questions yes thank you so much for all the participation sure well take care be safe out there and do every prevention you can take care of everybody all right bye-bye
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