Ivomec medication for dogs / sarcoptic mange
 

Our two full size Labs have been itchy all summer, treated for a bacterial skin infection already, itching came back and today and Vet prescribed Ivomec for possible sarcoptic mange. I almost fainted when she said "mange" and "scabies!" I grew up thinking that dogs and people die of the mange and I sure never knew it was a bug?

We did an internet search and found all sorts of differing information and many "home brews" that say they can get rid of mites, mange, and everything else too - maybe even do the dishes.......

Anyone used Ivomec? Any other remedies you used with good results?
Anyone know what else can be done holistically to keep it from coming back? Did anyone have other animals to get it from a dog? Ever heard of coyote passing it on to dogs? (we have coyote around right now and dogs had been out digging at the coyote trails)

I am posting in Pets section too. Thank you for ideas and comments.

Many years ago we bought our dog from a kennel and after treating her for "allergies" for a long time with no decent results we changed vets who knew by just looking at her she had sarcoptic mange and which kennel we bought her from (rant!!!).

Anyway we were given a shampoo (with lindane?) which we used once a week for many weeks. It worked miracles. The first night we used it she fell asleep almost immediately she was so exhausted from the itching.

I do not know anything about natural or home remedies or the Ivomec. I do know that the shampoo the vet sold us worked very well. I'm wishing you the best of luck treating your poor doggies.

I spot my dogs with a dose of ivermectin pour-on once a month at the shoulderblades. No worries. I just pour on a bit right out of the bottle. I have four dogs, it works well on all of them. I quit on Heartguard Plus once I knew this would work, and this is a lot cheaper.

There is a genetic component to mange, that makes a dog more susceptable. Spot on the ivermectin once a month, get most all worms including heartworms, plus the mites. And it knocks back fleas, ticks and skeeters.

The wife just bought some wormer for one dog she thought had pinworm (ivermectin doesn't work well on those). Turns out all it was is fenbendazole, but she forked over $25 for those pills in a box! I kept the box so I know the dose, and next time that dog will get horse paste!

If you feed your dog a big cheap Wal-Mart can of sardines once a week, it will help the skin and coat a lot and may help prevent mange mites. We do that, too.

Yeah, but then your dogs have penguin breath. :help:

Hmmm...mange or penguin breath for a while...that's a tough one for me. LOL.

If you have more money than I do, you can give them fish oil capsules in their food and do the same thing with less stinky breath. :shrug:

If you have even more money, you can buy a fancy doggy version of fish oil capsules that costs you double what the human pills do. ;)

Thank you! The fish oil tabs sound good. Thank you.

Mange
 

www.nustock.com
http://www.earthclinic.com/Pets/dog_mange_cure.html

One year, the coyotes were absolutely covered in mange. My Great Pyrs picked it up from contact with them. ( For the record, it was brief and bloody contact)
Anyway, I treated them with Ivomec and that cleared them up. They were just too darn big to try to bathe and treat as you would a house pet.
Tana Mc

My own dogs picked up mange by checking out a barn that was home to scabby cats. A client's dog got it by digging up a fox den. Sarcoptic mange responds well to Ivermectin, or the Pfizer product called Revolution. Pouring on Ivomec can be risky - it is toxic when overdosed. And it doesn't do anything against fleas or ticks. Since dogs don't get pinworms, I suspect the worms seen by Jim's wife were tapeworms. Quite likely acquired during a flea infestation.

Fish oil helps keep skin healthy, but it doesn't kill mites. Canine sarcoptes mites can live for a time on humans, usually causing a rash at the belt line. To prevent family members from developing skin problems I'd treat the dog right away with a product that's proven effective.

Be sure to NOT use any form of ivermectin if your dog is has any Collie, it will be fatal.

WHat are you feding your dogs? That's the first question I'd ask.
It may be allergies to something they are eating.
I found out that my dogs couldn't eat dairy of all things.

In the day we would treat mange with used motor oil.

We have a lab with this same problem. The vet is treating her for food allergies. Right now she is on special meds (total of 6 pills a day) and food ($40/bag). It's expensive, and I'm not convinced that's what's wrong with her. My question is...is the mange contagious to other dogs? We also have a beagle who is unaffected. Does this mean the lab probably does not have mange? Anyone know?

Hello and thank you everyone - we are not sure what this is, and the Vet said she was not sure either. She said "maybe" the mange and it would be good to treat it and see if this works, AND we are bathing them in...something...not sure what...some herbal rinse. One dog has it, the 2nd one does not seem to. We think they got it from digging out coyote dens. We did have exterminator out, we did the wash of all bedding on porch, cleaned out their sleeping barn and put in fresh pine straw, and the one dog that has the itchy spots we are putting a topical antibiotic on her scratch places. We are not measuring the Ivomec ourselves. The Vet weighed the dogs, measured out the doses into little syringes and we will give to the dogs once per week for three weeks. Its too soon to know yet if it will or has worked. If it does not work, then we are back to square one to see what is causing her rash.

I am still in awe that the mange does not just make the dogs and me too drop dead on the spot! I can remember stories as a child where someone would growl and say "mange mange" and we kids would run and scream! Someone just have tried to scare us about it.

Thanks!

"Maybe" mange? Didn't the vet take a skin scrape to check under a microscope for the mange mites?

I agree with Crow, when my Chihuahua came down with it he did a scraping and looked at it under a microscope. He said all dogs have the mange mites but their natural body defenses keep them in check. A tendency to get a problem with them is inherited. In my dog's case the mange surfaced when she came into heat that lowered her resistance. He recommended I have her spayed, which I did. I had to take her for dips at the vets I think 4 times and she has had no problem since then (almost 4 years).

Ivermectin
 

Interesting post, Jim S., what kind of paste (bimectin,...) and how did you administer it? How often and how much at a time?

Smell their skin--smell like musty mice? best way I can explain it--like a drawer or somethiing that has a mouse nest. Sounds crazy, But I've found demeodic mange has this smell

It is used for demodex, but it is a HUGE amount of the drug. It really should be given under a vet's care because ivermectin toxicity is common. It does self resolve in almost all cases, but still..... you would want a vet to do it.
Here's some links with dosages. But like I said it is a huge amount. I wouldn't do it myself without a vet.
http://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid...w=1024&bih=663

It's like triple the normal amount given to prevent heartworms. And it is given on a daily basis for a month. It very well could cause ivermectin toxicity.

I've always heard that Ivomec should be given orally. There is dosage info out there, but I've been too nervous to try it myself. The vet we used for years before we moved would even mix it with glycerin if you brought it in to them. They didn't "recommend" it, but knew there were a lot of farmers in the area and wanted to be sure the dogs were getting what they needed.

Ivermectin.I wouldn't mess around with any home remedy, when my dog was suffering.
http://www.vetmed.wsu.edu/announceme...ectin/explains the latest on Collies that are allergic to ivermectin.

They don't sell that OTC at pharmacies any longer. You might try the lice killer that they have on the shelf now? I'm not sure what chemical is in it, but you can get it at WalMart or any chain store like that. It's what they use on humans for lice.

I wanted to add the scholar links to this too. They used four times the amount instead of three for both sarcoptic and demodectic mange.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl...%2C14&as_sdtp=

This one says ivermectin toxicity was avoided by using it orally instead of injecting subcutaneously. They used the ivo/moxi combo.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...04401700003575

And in this one they used 6x the amount normally given for heartworms, and gave it orally. I would be afraid to do that myself.
http://agris.fao.org/agris-search/se...l;TH2001004050

You could try the alternative to Ivermec: Vet Tricorder
http://readwrite.com/2013/01/02/extr...ct-of-ces-2013

This was an OLD thread. Someone is going through the archives and bringing up things from years and years ago.

Fish oil, mixed in with their food will usually cure itchiness, it'll take a few weeks but its worth it.

Just saw this is a 6 year old thread.

Here is something to think about. I did a great deal of testing at home and found my lab has an allergy to pork and carrots.
The heart worm pill i was giving her every month had a small amount of pork in it. Enough to trigger a reaction from her tho.
She had terrible itchy sores, repeated ear infections, ect.
We bathed,medicated and we even went so far as to take her to a state veterinary hospital. We fed her bags of special dog food that cost $80.00 a bag.
Once we made the heart worm pill connection,
we took her off that and the vet gives her an injection once a month now for heart worms. She did much better after that. However, during really hot parts of summer she still got a few areas on skin that would flare up.
We shaved her down to the skin last summer once and left it to grow back out before winter. That allowed sun and air to get down on her skin and that helped a great deal too. If you own a lab you know how THICK and dense their fur is. Once the skin gets irritated down under all that fur, it's hard to get it cleared up.
I may never know all the answers as to why she still gets a few sores in hot weather, but I'm letting you know what has worked for us. SHe is 12 and we've been battling this for years.

OOps, didn't realize this was an old tread. Oh well maybe it will help someone else.

I didn't see that. It just showed up under New Posts. Sorry.
I hope he didn't accidentally kill his dogs.

Those are hot spots. You can shave away the extra fur and apply hydrocortisone. Sometimes they need some dex from the vet. But they are called hot spots. Shaving away the covering fur is the most important part of treatment.

Coyotes and mange
 

Yes, I think it is what happened to us. My dogs and never leave the property, yet all of a sudden Sarcoptic mange was upon us. Our local MFA tells me that coyotes have been shot and found the pelts useless because of mange. Even the squirrels carry it and this time of year he said it is real bad.

You'll come out FAR cheaper to do it yourself, and the PROPER treatment is DAILY doses until a couple of weeks after symptoms disappear.
You can get a 50 ML bottle for about $45

Use !% injectible Ivomec, given ORALLY, at 1/10th ML per 10 lbs of body weight.
For Heartworms ONLY, 1/10 ML TOTAL every 4-6 weeks is sufficient.

Your Vet should KNOW if it's mange by doing a skin scraping

I personally see it a very helpful. At least current links are provided if nothing else. Besides I need to review things like this once in awhile. Nice to have fresh on the mind when the issue comes up.

Since we are beating the dead horse anyway LOL Mekasmom is the only person I saw mention both manges. There is sarcoptic and demodectic mange. Sarcoptic is contagious from animal to animal (coyote/dog, cat/ dog, coyote/cat, dog/human, etc), demodectic is inherited and used to be called "red mange". Demodectic can also affect organs and circulation. I have seen a dog's leg swell to 3 times normal size because demodexosis kept the fluid trapped. Demodex mites are present on all dogs, but usually kept in check, it's when the system doesn't work that the dog shows symptoms. If you catch it early and treat aggressively, you can keep it in remission so the dog can have a healthy life. I always get my vet's advice because a skin scraping isn't expensive and I want to be sure what I'm fighting. JMO

There are actually three types of mange. The other one is called Cheyletilosis (I think). I am not really familiar with that one though. When I was helping at the vet's office, it was mentioned, but I don't think any dog ever actually had it.

Cool! I learned my something new today :) Looking it up says anything that treats the other manges works on them. Also called "walking dandruff" because the mites carry skin scales along with them.

You need to be careful using horse paste. Because the doses are so large, for horses that is, the med isn't always thoroughly mixed throughout the tube. IOW, the small blob you use to dose one dog may have next to no med in it while the blob for another may be almost all med.

We self med all of our dogs, except for rabies which are legally forbidden to do, and the only "dog" med we use is praziquantal to kill off tapeworms as needed.

PLEASE do a LOT of research before trying this. There's a lot of bad and/or wrong info out there.

I hate to inform you but heartguard which is vet approved for collies is ivermectin just in a very low dose. Just enough to be mostly effective.

If ivermectin and milbemycin is dangerous, why do we still give it to dogs that could have an MDR1 gene mutation?

The key to remember here is the dosage. Dogs who are sensitive to ivermectin can be negatively affected if they receive a dose of 50-100 micograms per kilogram. The amount of ivermectin that is in a dose of Heartgard is 6-12 micograms per kilogram and is not at all toxic to dogs even if they are carrying the MDR1 gene mutation.
For milbemycin, dogs with the MDR1 gene mutation can see neurological side effects at a dose of about 90 micograms per kilogram. Interceptor and sentinel usually delivers about 7-10 micograms per kg of milbemycin to the dog.
Both drugs are very safe to give to any dog as long as we give the recommended dosage.

For heartworms we use sheep drech which is .08% or 800 mcg/cc. The dose in heartguard 2.72mcg/pound. We give it at around 5.5 mcg/cc which works out to about 0.37 cc for a 40 pound dog. This means you have to have a 1 cc syringe to dose it out. Squirt it onto a piece of bread and toss it to them.

FYI, a higher dose is no problem for most dogs. AAMOF, it is often given at much higher doses for other problems.

Years ago I messed up and wound giving our American Bulldog what turned out to be a dose 100 TIMES the dosage above for years. it never gave him any problems.

Yes Ivermetin is so safe that in 3rd world countries they are using it on people to deworm them.

ivomec works in my personal experience most of the hunters I know use it or horse wormer with ivomec it is rare to see any mange or mites or even fleas any more .when I was young it was a common plage . caution though I have heard some sheep and cattle dogs it can,t be used on . I use it to get rid of ear mites in rabbits and it works the best yet. just a few drops in the ear dogs a squirt in the mouth or shot under the skin .I,m not a vet just know what works for me .it will get rid of mites on chickens a few drops under the wings poured on the back of pigs

I thought it was used in N America for some things on Humans. My vet brought it up if I remember right. I think most farmers that have tried the cattle pour on version have accidentally tried it! :yuck: