The Parvovirus is a viral disease that affects puppies much more than adult dogs as it likes to inhabit rapidly dividing cells. This viral disease is highly contagious and can live outside the body of a dog for a great deal of time. It is most commonly found living in the intestinal tract and causes a chronic diarrhea to set in.
This can cause severe issues with your puppy, including the untimely death of the little one. The virus attacks the white blood cells and, thus, can infect the heart muscles leading to a sudden death.
Adult dogs can carry this virus and show no signs of having any symptoms, other than diarrhea. This makes it hard to keep your dogs from contracting this virus as you may not know that one of your dogs is carrying it. Once the dog sheds the virus in its excrement it can live for up to 9 months or longer. This makes it easy for other dogs to become infected if they so much as stray too close to the infected pile.
Although there are vaccines for the parvovirus, it usually hard to keep your puppies vaccinated from it. Most vets suggest that you vaccinate your puppies every couple of weeks after the puppy reaches 6 weeks of age. Because of the risk involved with constantly vaccinating your puppies, it is suggested that you keep a very close eye on them when they are so young.
If you start to notice chronic diarrhea in your puppy, you should contact your vet immediately to make sure your puppy doesn’t have the Parvovirus. If it does have the Parvovirus, your vet will be able to give it the attention it needs to help it get rid of this very nasty virus.
The Parvovirus is one of the most common and deadly serious virus issues your dog can get. You have to make sure that if there is a contagion in your dog or puppy, that you quarantine your dog away from your other dogs if you have more than one.
This quarantine should last a little over a month after the dog is deemed healthy and Parvo free by your vet. You should also make sure that you, or no other animal, has stepped in the infected stools in the yard and brought them inside or into contact with your other dogs. The best measure is to remove the stool completely from your yard.
While it may be difficult to make sure that you dogs don’t catch this viral disease, it makes it much safer for them if you can. Taking the time to prevent this disease from spreading through all of your dogs is a process that will take time and care, but it’s something you should try your best to accomplish.