We get alot of slugs in our garden i know they are not gd news for dogs but how can you deter them as i think my Max might b eating them, and also what are the symptoms of lung worm???

Max seems to be breathing heavy nearly all the time, is this something to worry about, if anyone can help me would be very much appreciated. :)

Many thanks ;)

Hi, sorry, I'm new here, but looked into lungworm before I got my Lab puppy this week.

http://www.lungworm.co.uk/what-is-this-lungworm/?gclid=CO_Rw96UobECFU6JfAod8XoPfg

Is a good site, lots of info. In summary Lung worm is more rife at the moment due to the weather. Slugs and snails are breeding in the wonderful warm and damp like wildfire, so there are more than usual in our gardens.

Symptoms can include:

Coughing/breathing problems
Tiredness
Nosebleeds
Eye bleeding
Anaemia, which makes the gums and pinks of the eyes pale
There could also be depression and fits.

Some dogs have no symptoms at all, which is disheartening.

If you think he may have lungworm, or even eats slugs on a regular basis, I would take him to the vet. They can do tests for lungworm, and start treatment. Most dogs do well and go on to live happy waggy tail lives after an infection if caught early.

It is not deterred via normal worming tablets, currently, however often you administer.

Hope this helps, and your dog is back to his normal self soon

Hiya Anjenha

Thankyou for this helpful info. ;)

How old is Max?

Is he old enough to know what he can cannot eat (Except slugs, My Jack russel was still eating earthworms at 12!)? I ask as Bashed up eggshells or sand are a great slug detterent. If small enough, the paticles get stuck to their undersides and is irritating :)

Worth a go if you think Max won't eat/inhale it

Get him treated with Advocate in any case as this will kill them if he is infected.... and will work for all other common parasites.

I would really caution you to be careful with the Advocate.

Firstly:  That website posted above (www.lungworm.co.uk) is owned, created and designed by Bayer - who manufacture Advocate.  Of course they are going to stir up huge concern, on their own website, for lungworm - to encourage you to go to your vet and request a 'preventative spot on'.  What could that possibly be?  Uh... their own product, of course! 

Spot-ons are powerful pesticides designed to affect the neurological systems of insects.  They also interact with the neurological systems of other animals to some extent, they are carcinogenic, they kill honeybees and butterflies, and personally I wouldn't be putting anything like that on a dog unless I knew absolutely and without doubt that it needed it.

Why don't you try Milbemax or Panacur instead - both oral meds, and Panacur doesn't even need a prescription either.

Several studies have concluded that the new spot on treatments are safe and efficacious for lungworm with the added advantage of only needing one chemical treatment to treat several parasitic conditions.

My vet recommends it ...good enough for me.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304401707002385

"This prospective study demonstrates that both treatment protocols used are efficacious under field conditions, that treatment of mildly to moderately infected dogs with either of these protocols ( imidacloprid 10%/moxidectin 2.5% spot-on solution and Panacur) is safe and yields an excellent prognosis for recovering from the infection."

Rarely worm our dogs but due to the plague of snail & slugs around - & both regularly eat grass -  just used Panacur for the first time. Have been really impressed, no upset stomachs, colitis & reasonably priced.

Thku all :) max is 2 in August :) but recently we lost our Sam who was a RR from a fit he couldnt come out of, Sam was 1year and 8months :( Max is behaving oddly at the mo. due to  our loss, hes not eating only tit bits n grass and bringing up bile im trying to coax him into eating his food but he dosent want to know :\ Sam died last Saturday so gonna take time for Max, the slugs i havent seen Max eat them but he might so thats why i ask, it has been a week n a half since we lost Sam so il keep an rye on him for another week then if no change in his behaviour then we will go to the vets. :)

Thks Guys much appreciated ;)

>Several studies have concluded that the new spot on treatments are safe and efficacious for lungworm

Of course studies show that what is available on the market is safe and efficacious - not only for lungworm, but all spot-ons - otherwise these things wouldn't be on the market.

But they ARE powerful pesticides, and we KNOW that pesticides have harmful effects on people and animals.  It's just the dosage which ensures it doesn't (if anything). 

Personally, where there is an oral med available, I would much prefer to use that because it's only going to affect the species and animal you want it to affect - not everything in the environment, including kids and other insects.

>with the added advantage of only needing one chemical treatment to treat several parasitic conditions.

Actually, that's not true.  There are several parasites not covered by Advocate - one of them being ticks.  There is no oral tick preventative, so are you going to treat your dog with 2 spot-ons a month, one for ticks and one for other parasites?! 

>My vet recommends it ...good enough for me.

Your vet receives over a third of annual income from flea, tick and worming products.  Your vet is being paid a lot to promote and market Advocate to clients.  Glad you have such faith in your vet's motives.

GET TO THE VETS ASAP!!!!

The only sign my puppy had with this was refusal to eat and she was badly infected, no breathlessness, no coughing, nothing but refusal to eat.  I will admit I am now paranoid about worms and the like but I really nearly lost a 4 month old puppy to this so get to the vets, get some stool samples run.  If you collect before you go they want 3 morning, night and morning and you need to refrigerate the samples.  You can probably get a jar from the vets for it. 
My puppy never ate slugs to my knowledge but they can get it from the slime!

Hi, I recently used Advocate on my 17 week old toy puppy without any problems as she was eating grass, worms and most probably slugs.
Advocate is used as a preventative whereas the others are, I believe, designed to treat lungworm. However I would also happily use the others.
Rabid posted a link recently which, if I read it right, showed that Millibax treated 3 of the 4 types of lungworm whereas Advocate and the other wormer mentioned treat only 1 or 2.
There doesn't seem to be one perfect wormer that treats everything so perhaps alternating wormers to treat everything may be the way to go.

To my knowledge, lungworm does not show up in stool samples...  Because it's not an intestinal parasite. 

If you took stool samples to the vet, your puppy didn't have lungworm, but would have had one of the other many worms which are covered by a routine tape or roundwormer.

Angio something or other - French heartworm, giardia and one or two other things!  But certainly one of the things that was mentioned was lungworm.

"with the added advantage of only needing one chemical treatment to treat several parasitic conditions.
Actually, that's not true."

I said several...not all.I dont treat for ticks as Ive never had one on my dogs.

>Your vet receives over a third of annual income from flea, tick and worming products.

My vet is a specialist cardiologist who just happens to be a friend and advises on anything else I ask.....her advice is based on extensive study and experience. I get my meds at cost so your point is irrelevant.

One of my oldies has developed a small cough which I had assumed was heart related but turned out her heart is fine so she advised
I immediatly treat her with Advocate in case it is Angiostrongylus as this is ....in her opinion... the most efficient treatment.

Yes I have faith in her abilities and motives.

That is what Roxy had!
My vet also stocks food but that does not stop them from advocating raw as best possible feeding plan

>Angio something or other - French heartworm, giardia and one or two other things!  But certainly one of the things that was mentioned was lungworm.

I'm not clear - your dog had heartworm/lungworm AND giardia?  What tests were run to diagnose heartworm?  If the only tests run were on stools, that's not going to enable a diagnosis of heartworm. 

Or your vet thought that one of the things your dog might have was heartworm, so suggested you treat with Advocate just in case?

The two things are very different...

>I dont treat for ticks as Ive never had one on my dogs.

You're very lucky then, as most people in the UK - including those who are being made anxious about lungworm by belligerent vets - do have to deal with ticks.  Therefore most dogs in the UK would then be requiring 2 spot-ons a month.  Including, I'd guess, the OP, who you've advised to give Advocate.

I have several clients who have wrongly assumed their dog is protected against ticks when using Advocate, and have then been puzzled to find ticks on their dogs.  People are assuming it protects against ticks when it doesn't.

>My vet is a specialist cardiologist

A specialist cardiologist is even more likely to see everything as heart-related - that being their speciality...

>I get my meds at cost so your point is irrelevant.

Again, you are very lucky, since most people in the UK do not.  Including, I'd guess, the OP in this thread who has been advised to treat against lungworm by yourself.

>One of my oldies has developed a small cough which I had assumed was heart related but turned out her heart is fine so she advised I immediatly treat her with Advocate in case it is Angiostrongylus as this is ....in her opinion... the most efficient treatment.

I guess, on experiencing a cough myself, I could pop to the local A&E and demand a chemo drug, too.  That's taking the logic to the extreme, but the case is the same.  Unless something has been diagnosed and determined through a test to be lungworm, we don't know that it is.  We can, of course slap any drug on, after taking a best guess as to what it is.  However we don't really know what it was, and we also don't really know if the drug solved it or if it would have gotten better anyway.

This is, I think, a very good article on lungworm from a vet (yes, really):  http://www.purtonvets.co.uk/purtonblog/2011/04/lungworm.html

Crucial points made therein:

"I sense a degree of panic setting in and want to reassure you that the risk is lower than suggested.  If you know for a fact that your dog eats slugs or snails then you need to speak to us as it can be a dangerous condition.  If you never see your dog eating slugs and snails then its very unlikely you will have a problem.

There seems to be a concerted effort within the veterinary industry to increase worming frequencies to monthly and I think this is driven by drug companies rather than by common sense. One company in particular makes a veterinary only POM flea/wormer spot-on called Advocate.  You have to use it monthly to prevent fleas which means you have to worm monthly and its a product that goes into the bloodstream.  Its also the only licensed preventative treatment for lungworm.  Both the drug company and vets benefit from increased sales of the product and they want to create awareness of the problem."

Roxy had Angiostrongylus, Giardia and campylobacter.  Labs were done and came back positive for all those things.  The only sample I sent was stools. 
I know Angiostrongylus does not always show in stool tests, I consider myself very lucky that this infection did show and I was able to treat quickly and effectively.
I saw the labs and actually my vet treated with panacur, I use advocate within my worming programme now as a preventative

My point is not that no dogs ever get lungworm: It's that lungworm is not as prevalent as folk say, that there is almost mass fear and anxiety out there about it, that many dogs receive Advocate IMO unnecessarily because they are at low risk of contracting it, and that the anxiety and concern is fostered and encouraged by vets and drug manufacturers - who stand to profit massively if everyone is treating their dog monthly with Advocate. 

When people then post about what are very common symptoms (like going off food for a day or two, or a slight cough) and are then immediately told by people on forums to treat their dogs ASAP for lungworm - it only further promotes the already considerable anxiety out there on the subject.

Until about 4-5 yrs ago, lungworm was unheard of amongst knowledgeable doggie folk (such as most of us).  It's not impossible that it has taken over the UK, but I'm left wondering if the drug (market) meets the need or creates the need in the first place.

> A specialist cardiologist is even more likely to see everything as heart-related - that being their speciality...

Well I suppose it all boils down to ...do we take the advice of a trusted and qualified senior vet..... or a dog trainer!

:-)

The only symptom my dog had was a refusal to eat.

My vet did not even mention worms at that point of any sort.  She like me thought I had a fussy brat and would need to mix her kibble with some wet food or something she would eat (she ate hills a/c at the surgery).  She did labs as a purely precautionary measure.  In this instance I was lucky enough that her infection showed on the labs that were done. 

I could have left with a few tins of hills, and continued to go back to buy my hills from the vets for as long as she was eating them and ended up with a very sick, possibly permanently damaged puppy.

I use advocate as part of my worming program now after doing my own research.  My advise to the OP was to speak to a vet, she was the one who mentioned lungworm being a concern, couple that with a dog who is not eating and I would be very concerned.  It's not a great deal to get labs done and a vet check to put your mind at rest.  I would consider it money well spent

>Well I suppose it all boils down to ...do we take the advice of a trusted and qualified senior vet..... or a dog trainer!

No, because that's not what's under discussion here:  You're not the OP who originally posted here, asking for advice.  I'm not giving you advice for your dog.  Your cardiologist vet is not advising the OP here to use Advocate. 

Instead, you are taking advice given to you and your specific dog, by your own vet, and passing it onto another dog owner.

The specific advice given to you by your one vet does not = what every dog owner should do, regardless of their dog.  Phew, if that was the case, who would need to go to the vet for a whole range of symptoms?  We'd just all do the same thing - treat with Advocate, given any of the many symptoms which lungworm can present as:  Your dog loses weight.  Treat it with Advocate!  Your dog wheezes or sneezes a few times - quick, put Advocate on it!  Your dog coughs for a couple of days - don't waste time, stick Advocate on! 

Meanwhile - kerching, and the cash rolls in at the vet's...

>you are taking advice given to you and your specific dog, by your own vet, and passing it onto another dog owner.

And you are taking your cynical view and advising people to distrust vets.

If perhaps I was a fool, or young and inexperienced, didnt have science degree and a husband with several medical degrees.......
and a lifetime of breeding and keeping dogs, I may agree with you ;-)

In any case I'll bow out of this thread now.

Sorry OP, I hope you asked your vet for advice.

Just back to one of the issues raised earlier.  Apparently lung worm DOES show up in the stools - so regular testing is probably at least as good a way to go than dosing.  I'm not that keen on spot-ons - I think the chemicals are extremely powerful & seem to make my dog feel ill (even though she is a strong, young and healthy dog).  So my intention is to regularly get her stools tested for Lungworm as she is keen on eating grass and drinking from puddles. 

Mind you - good luck to the technicians - she's raw fed & her pooh's are a bit like concrete . . .

Tagging on at the end. My dog died of lungworm in 2010. He had no symptoms, no coughing, breathlessness, no tiredness - his usual naughty self the day before, jumping around excitedly when my daughter visited in the evening. Woke to find him shivering, wouldn't eat breakfast, straight to the vet who gave him AB jab. Back at lunchtime, had unsedated chest xray which showed a mass. Sent to specialist vet by which time he was bleeding from the nose and gums. I hour later they told us to make the decision - his lung function had dropped so low, he was drowning in his blood. He was 14 months old - I had never seen him eat a slug or snail but we live in a lungworm area. I had missed one months treatment of Advocate! Later heard that 3 dogs, 3 different vets, had died in the previous and following weeks.

I use Advocate on my boy each month, but Panacur on my girl as she developed a reaction to Advocate. I can't take the risk to not use it even though it is nasty stuff that you can smell on the coat, breath and pee for a few days :-( I an constantly on tenterhooks with my girl as Panacur only treats, not prevents. Her dosage is such that she is only partially being treated, so every 3 or 4 months she has the full longer, treatment dose. She is a 'cougher' so it's hard to tell if it is breed specific brachy symptoms or something more sinister! :-(

I don't use a tick treatment as have never needed to around here/never seen one.

> You're very lucky then, as most people in the UK - including those who are being made anxious about lungworm by belligerent vets - do have to deal with ticks.

Are ticks a common problem? I've grown up with dogs, we've never needed to treat any of our dogs for ticks (countryside walks, not urban) so would never consider using a preventative tick treatment.

>Are ticks a common problem?

If you walk through fields which have had sheep in them recently, then yes, quite common. At work we need to remove ticks from dogs most weeks.

> If you walk through fields which have had sheep in them recently, then yes, quite common

Ah, we used to walk in cow fields and now walk in an old orchard with no cattle access. Thanks JG, I didn't know about the sheep connection.

> Are ticks a common problem?

Depends where you live and on what type of land your dogs are walked.  We rarely get them in our immediate vicinity, even though we have plenty of animal grazing in fields round here (N Somerset, salt marsh land) BUT we often get them at my parents on Dartmoor and ALWAYS get them at my parents in law in North Hampshire.

However the only preventative I use, when I remember, is garlic juice spray.  It's actually pretty effective at stopping some of the little buggers cadging a lift but a tick remover afterwards is my usual response.

It's generally worth googling your local area with 'ticks' in the title just to see what comes up.  You sometimes find farming studies which note an increase in tick borne diseases that are well worth a read.  If you have large estates of privately owned and managed land you'll often see accounts associated with gamekeepers reports...

killickchick, that is awful, to hear your dog died so quickly and unexpectedly :(

Can I ask roughly whereabouts in the UK you're based?

And also, was the worm which killed your dog the angio[etc] one, or was it one of the other 3 types of lungworm - or don't you know?

>I an constantly on tenterhooks with my girl as Panacur only treats, not prevents.

The way the preventatives work is by killing the immature forms of the worm, before they've developed into the adult.  To 'treat' lungworm would involve to kill the adults as well as the immature forms.  So if something 'treats', it is doing more than something which just 'prevents'.

However, the situation in the UK is actually very complicated.  The link someone posted (it wasn't me) was v helpful.  To recap:

We're talking about 4 different worms and the various meds we're discussing (Panacur, Milbemax and Advocate) don't even claim that they work against all the worms.  Some vets seem to think they do, but I don't know if that is based on any research or experience or is just misinformation as a result of being unaware that there are 4 kinds of worm. 

They are:

Angiostrongylus vasorum (this is the one most of you mean when you say 'lungworm', it is the one which has allegedly increased in prevalence recently)
Oslerus osleri
Filaroides hirthi
Crenosoma vulpis

Panacur: 
" for the treatment of dogs infected with lungworm Oslerus (Filaroides) osleri "

Milbemax:
" Angiostrongylus vasorum (reduction of the level of infection; see specific treatment schedule under dosage and administration)."
" Crenosoma vulpis(reduction of the level of infection),"

Advocate:
"  prevention of heartworm disease (L3 and L4 larvae of Dirofilaria immitis) and angiostrongylosis (L4 larvae and immature adults of Angiostrongylus vasorum), treatment of Angiostrongylus vasorum and Crenosoma vulpis"

These are the specific uses which the meds have been tested against and found to be effective.  They may or may not also have other functions and be effective against other of the 4 lungworms, we don't know.  As you'll see, there is no one drug which treats all 4 types of lungworm.  Several only 'reduce the level of infection' rather than treat.  And there are specific treatment schedules to follow, if you want to use these meds for lungworm:

Panacur:
" For the control of lungworm Oslerus (Filaroides) osleri in dogs administer 1 ml per 2 kg bodyweight daily for 7 consecutive days (= 50 mg fenbendazole/kg bodyweight daily for 7 days)."  [Not sure what 'control' means, in our attempt to understand the difference between 'treat' and 'prevent'.]

Milbemax:
"For Angiostrongylus vasorum infection, milbemycin oxime should be given four times at weekly intervals. It is recommended, where concomitant treatment against cestodes is indicated, to treat once with MILBEMAX and continue with the monovalent product containing milbemycin oxime alone, for the remaining three weekly treatments."  [This means that you should give Milbemax one week, then for the next 3 weeks you should give a product which contains one of the 2 drugs in Milbemax - milbemycin oxime.  Unfortunately we don't have such a drug in the UK.  They do in the US, it's called Interceptor.  Quite why someone can't sell Interceptor over here, I don't know.]

Advocate:
"Treatment and Prevention of Angiostrongylus vasorum (Dogs)
A single dose should be administered. A further veterinary examination 30 days after treatment is recommended as some animals may require a second treatment.
In endemic areas regular four weekly application will prevent angiostrongylosis and patent infection with Angiostrongylus vasorum.

Treatment of Crenosoma vulpis (Dogs)
A single dose should be administered."

So there you have it.

killickchick, the reason I asked if it was angiostrongylus which your dog died of, is because, if you missed only 1 dose of Advocate, I can't see how it could have been:  The lifecycle of the worm is such that it would take longer than that for them to develop through the various larval stages and then reach such a severe worm burden as you describe.  There is more info on the lifecyle of it here:  http://journals2005.pasteur.ac.ir/TP/21(2).pdf   (V good article - include the .pdf to make the link work - copy and paste what I wrote and don't just click on it!)  I do wonder if it was instead one of the other lungworms which Advocate doesn't cover - Oslerus osleri or Filaroides hirthi .  That would explain how you could be treating with Advocate and still end up with lungworm.

Finally in terms of whether the worms can be found in stool samples or not - often they are not found (this taken from article above):  "Larval recovery from the faeces of infected animals is unreliable because of poor test sensitivity, as well as a relatively long pre-patent period and possibly intermittent egg production by adult worms."  So I for sure would not be doing stool samples before deciding whether or not to treat.

The other point which comes across in the article is just that no one knows much about lungworm.  We don't even know if it can be transmitted direct from fox faeces to dogs (if a dog eats faeces), or if it needs an intermediate host by way of a slug or snail.  There are not enough answers about it, and the patchy info and guidelines from drug companies about how to prevent it echo this confusion...

OH, I forgot to say a bit more about Interceptor.

Milbemax contains praziquantel and milbemycin oxime.

Interceptor contains only milbemycin oxime.

In the US, Interceptor is widely available because it also works against heartworm and lots of owners give it monthly as a heartworm preventative.  Since we don't have heartworm in the UK, it has never been marketed or sold here.  Even if you look at the worms it treats against, it doesn't list lungworm as one of them - why?  Because they don't have it in the US!  So:  They have heartworm and not lungworm.  We have lungworm and not heartworm.  http://www.interceptorpet.com/resources/INT_product_label_info.pdf

Yet milbemycin oxime is effective against lungworm, as this study shows: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15264484

I'd really like to see it available here as a monthly oral preventative.  I'm going to email Novartis to ask why it's not and to point out that it is also effective against lungworm and perhaps they might like to research its application there, since Advocate currently has the entire market for lungworm in the UK...

Of course this is extra confusing because according to Milbemax's own product info (quoted in my previous post), it only 'reduces the level of infection', and doesn't treat/cure.  Yet, if you look at this study, it actually cures/treats and so does more than their own product info claims. 

Such is the ridiculous minefield of this whole subject!!