Treatment of heartworm (if heartworm doesn’t kill the animal first) is with diethylcarbamazine or Ivermectin. Prevention is really important and it’s also really important to get your dog tested for heartworm BEFORE giving it the preventative because if the wormer or preventative kills the worms off too quickly, the animal may have an anaphylactic reaction and die. It’s a bad deal.
Dioctophyma renale causes Dioctophymiasis. Symptoms of this disease in the human include renal dysfunction, blood in the urine and kidney spasms. Urinalysis will reveal the eggs of D. renale but if the parasite is male, it can burrow into the abdomen and must be removed surgically. Eating raw or undercooked fish, frogs or crawfish livers can cause the disease.
you can get Capillaria from just about any infected animal—especially carnivores like dogs, cats, fox and even some birds or fish. Don’t eat raw fish. Rats seem to be heavily contaminated with this parasite.
Baylisascaris procyonis is a roundworm found in raccoons. The raccoons eat a piece of contaminated food that has the egg on it. The egg then matures in the raccoon into an adult in the small intestine which are passed into the feces and into the world. Rabbits, muskrats and other small critter then eat the grasses contaminated with the eggs that came from the raccoon and the cycle continues. The challenge is when a water source gets contaminated with raccoon feces or when a human has a pet raccoon with the parasite. If they accidentally pass the feces into their mouth the parasite can penetrate the gut wall and head straight to the brain making it mush. Yikes. Please treat all pet raccoons with a round wormer three times a year and wash your hands thoroughly after handling the critter.
People working around swine are very susceptible and if vegetables are not washed thoroughly a person can ingest the eggs and be host to the adult worms. A similar organism is found in the clouded leopard and causes subcutaneous abscesses in humans.
Anisakis causes Anisakiasis is caused by Anisakis marina giving acute abdominal pain, peritonitis and bloody diarrhea. People and animals get the parasite by eating raw, pickled or lightly salted fish or squid.