Tick-Borne Diseases & Your Dog’s Immune System
Ticks are able to transmit a single type of organism or multiple organisms to your dog through a single bite (coinfection), allowing different organisms to work together to release toxins and trigger your dog’s immune system.
Once these organisms find their way into your pet they invade your dogs cells and hijack their immune system. Some of the organisms spread by ticks are even capable of helping each other to survive inside your pets body, which can lead to recurring or chronic infections.
Conditions spread by ticks result in your dogs organs and tissues becoming infected and inflamed, resulting in a myriad of symptoms. In some cases, symptoms may not appear until several weeks after your pet has become infected with the disease.
Lyme disease is a bacterial infection that can affect humans, mammals, and birds. It is spread mainly through the bite of a deer tick.
Your first step in preventing your pet from getting lyme disease is to prevent the tick from spreading the disease to your pet. A good-quality flea and tick prevention is paramount in the prevention of the disease. Choose a product that repels ticks or kills the tick quickly. Even with preventatives, ticks may still attach. Thoroughly inspect your dog’s haircoat daily and physically remove any tick that you find on your pet.
Prevention: Like ehrlichia there is no vaccine to prevent anaplasmosis in your pet so it is recommend to keep current with your flea and tick preventive.
Treatment for anaplasma is similar for that for the other two tick-borne diseases mentioned. Many pets clear the infection without treatment and with no prolonged effects. However, subsequent annual 4dx tests may continue to be positive, which indicates exposure, but not necessarily active disease.
Unfortunately there is no proven vaccine to prevent ehrlichiosis. This makes your monthly flea and tick even more important.
Species of Ticks That Carry Infectious Pathogens
Brown dog ticks live and can infest inside and around homes and kennels where dogs are present, including in colder regions of North America such as Canada and Alaska.
Lone Star ticks, deer ticks, and Western black-legged ticks are most commonly found in the understory or leaf litter associated with natural wooded areas frequented by wildlife. The edge habitat often found surrounding a home or yard provides ample habitat to support these ticks.
American dog ticks, Rocky Mountain wood ticks and Gulf Coast ticks are more commonly found in tall, grassy meadows; open woods, particularly along trails; and open fields in agricultural areas.
Spinose ear ticks are found in arid areas west of the Mississippi, particularly in the south central and southwestern United States.
How tick-borne diseases can affect your pets
Tick-borne disease occurs when ticks infected with a pathogen bite a dog and transmit the pathogen into the dogs body. Many of these pathogens are zoonotic, meaning they can also infect humans. Disease is not spread between dogs and humans directly because these pathogens must complete their lifecycle phase within the tick to become infectious. Therefore, while humans and other non-canine family members can also become infected, a direct tick bite is required to transmit disease. The most common tick-borne diseases are Ehrlichiosis, Anaplasmosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Hepatozoonosis, Babesiosis, and Lyme disease. The feeding time required to allow disease transmission from a tick to a dog or person varies between ticks and disease agents. Ehrlichiosis and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever-causing bacteria can be transmitted within 3-6 hours of tick attachment, while Lyme Disease-causing bacterial transmission can require 24-48 hours of feeding before a host is infected.
Distribution of tick-borne disease is associated with the species of tick endemic to a given region. Distribution of tick species, prevalence of ticks within a region and the prevalence of infectious pathogens they carry is not stable and fluctuates on a seasonal basis depending on weather, rainfall and climate. For this reason monitoring of tick-borne disease is a dynamic, ongoing process.
This interactive map shows the number of reported positive cases of Ehrlichiosis, Lyme disease, Anaplasmosis and heartworm disease in dogs. Maps are available for all regions of the United States and Canada. Because so many dogs go untested for tick-borne diseases, the actual number of dogs infected by ticks is likely many times higher than reported figures.