How to Prevent Lyme Disease in Dogs

"Hi I’m Dr. Greg McDonald and we are talking about ticks and fleas for Expert Village.com. We want to talk a little bit. In the introduction we talked about some of the diseases and some of the problems you can have if you allow your pets to get fleas and ticks. But one of the serious ones is Lyme Disease. Lyme Disease is a disease that is transmitted by ticks. Your dog can get it and it is interesting because you can also get it in humans. With humans, we are doing a little bit better right now as far as diagnosing so we are not seeing the sickness that we used to. When this disease was new in humans, it was not getting diagnosed and people really had their lives taken away from them debilitating disease such as arthritis and other diseases like that. So actually this bacteria is transmitted by the tick into the blood stream and then it becomes a bacteria that is running around inside causing a lot of problems. If you diagnose this early you can put your dog on antibiotics but we are actually thinking that prevention would be better for those animals living in areas that have a lot of ticks. So this is a Lyme vaccination. It is made by Ft. Dodge and it consists of one shot and then a booster in about 3 weeks and an annual shot thereafter. I like this product in dogs that are routinely picking up ticks because it is hard for us as veterinarians to diagnose Lime Disease in your dog and we don’t want them getting really sick debilitating diseases that we could easily prevent."