Cool new products

One of the coolest aspects of my job is seeing all the great new products that arrive every year from our drug companies to help us help our pets. Right now Ventana Animal Hospital is assessing two new drugs to establish how helpful they will be to our clients.

A fair amount goes into any decision to carry a new medication. We must ask and answer several questions before we even consider bringing a new medication into our hospital.

First and foremost, does it solve a problem that cannot otherwise be solved. If we carried every cool drug out there we would have no room to treat pets, and we would be broke because all our money would be tied up on our shelves. Many drugs are redundant, or they cover the same ground as older drugs, or they have one small change over an existing drug - in these cases, there would have to be a very compelling reason to add them to our pharmacy. We are only interested in truly breakout drugs or innovations that really make a difference to your  life or the lives of your pets.

Second we ask ourselves what the research really says. Many medications, especially ones that people hear about on the internet or from the media are poorly or not at all supported by the science. We only bring in new medications that have been FDA approved, which mean that they have undergone extensive research into efficacy and safety. Even after undergoing FDA scrutiny we will oftentimes wait on a medication until others have used it for a while.

Lastly, we look at cost and need. Just because a medication is effective, it's use might be so limited that we would never use it, or use it so rarely that we could never use all of the product before it expired on our shelf. We also look at cost. If a medication is prohibitively expensive and it is not a huge improvement on existing medications we will not carry it.

So, what cool medications are we looking at right now?

First we are looking at a new flea and tick product called NexGard. Unlike every other flea and tick product on the market, this one is not topical. Instead of having insecticides on your dog - and your hands and furniture - the dog eats a chewable tablet once monthly. The tablet contains a naturally occurring insecticidal molecule - found, interestingly enough in living sponges to kill sea snails which will eat them otherwise.

In addition to NexGard we are also studying a new medication released by Zooetis for skin allergies. This medication has already been used successfully by local dermatology specialists. The product is called Apoquel. We are still looking into some of the details of this medication, how, exactly, it works, safety, dosing etc...

Every month we receive notice of some new medication, protocol, or gadget. We try to think about how these products can improve the quality of care that we offer. We rarely end up pursuing these new things because they often do not meet our criteria, so it exciting that we are looking at two new products at the same time.

Heartworm Prevention month

For those of you who may not be aware, Dr. Burrows, who lives in the Tanque Verde Valley got West Nile last fall. It took a bit of chasing to diagnose it, and when they finally did, all they could tell her to do was wait it out. Luckily for Dr. Burrows other than feeling pretty punky for a few weeks and having a bizarre tingling in her fingers that lingered for a month or so, the symptoms were very mild.

Which brings us to heartworms; heartworms do not affect people or they would be far more frightening than West Nile. They affect cats and dogs, and as the name suggests these worms migrate and live out their lives in the arteries around the heart.

What links these two diseases is the mosquito. Mosquitos account for more human deaths worldwide than any other animal. Arizona, with its dry climate is home to 46 varieties of mosquito according to the Arizona Department of Health. Mosquitos, the things that we, as Arizonans, take great pains to claim that we do not have are very much a part of our world. And as Dr. Burrows shows, not only do we have them, but they are carrying dangerous illnesses. (and yes, she picked up West Nile here)

No one wants to see their pets get sick, and every decision that we as pet owners take is a part of a balancing act between cost (not neccessarily financial) and benefits. We elect to put our dogs on tick prevention in the off chance that they may come into contact with a tick carrying a debilitating or fatal disease, or we deem the annoyance of tick products, their cost, their unsavory feel in our pet's coat, their toxicity no matter how small, too high and use them sparingly during travel.

This is a cost/benefit analysis and we, as pet owners do it every day. However, the only way this equation works is through education.

So, what we want pet owners in Southern Arizona to know, and what we strive to reinforce every day, is that the tightrope between cost and benefit that we have been walking for some time when it comes to heartworms has swung and that the danger of this disease, its rising prevalence in our coyote population, the increased interstate travel of your neighbors (and yourself) have all made the risk of doing nothing too high.

No one, not even veterinarians talked about heartworms in Southern Arizona even 15 years ago. But part of the belief that something isn't here is not looking for it. It was the advent of easier heartworm tests that saw an upswing in positives across Pima County. After Katrina and the dispersal of heartworm positive Katrina dogs into area shelters, veterinarians who hadn't already, felt a need to step up monitoring and prevention efforts.

Sadly, the numbers indicate that at least two or three of the dogs in our practice are, at this very moment, positive for heartworm. Perhaps they have no symptoms, or they have an occasional cough, or they are slightly more lethargic and the owners have put it off on age. We want to find these pets and help them feel better, and more importantly, we want them to stop carrying this deadly parasite in their blood.

The hearts represent all of the dogs who have come in so far this March who are protected against heartworms

We urge you, if you haven't already, to come in, have a heartworm test done and put your dogs on heartworm prevention.

Heartworm disease is devastating. It is expensive and awful to treat, while being largely inexpensive (around a $120 a year for a 100# dog) to prevent. The prevention that we use, Heartgard Plus also prevents against roundworms and hookworms.