Heartworm Disease - Plain and Simple

An educational video tickling your funny bone. More about heartworm disease: The American Heartworm Society: A knowledge base for veterinarians and pet owners alike. Merck Online Manuals: For pet owners: For veterinarians: PetMD: Detailed information for pet owners. European Scientific Counsel Companion Animal Parasites (ESCCAP) Guidelines: See page 14 for heartworms. These guidelines also take other vector-borne diseases into account such as Dirofilaria repens, a widespread parasite in Europe. A few words on heartworm disease in humans (left out of the video for various reasons): The human body is unable to properly nurture heartworms. Occasionally the parasite will infect a person by accident. It’s like drunks who try to enter their neighbour’s house by mistake when going home. The heartworm is a hardcore professional in a dog but an all-thumbs disaster in a human. The typical case of a pegasus versus a blind donkey on ice. The latter falls pretty fast but once in a while it can kick hard... Most of the time, the infectious larva dies soon after entering the human host. Longer migrations, however, do happen occasionally. The worm cannot properly develop upon reaching the pulmonary artery of a human - it hands in the towel way before adulthood. Its corpse, being really tiny, may or may not cause any symptoms. Sometimes people may cough a little and any resultant tissue damage can form a visible spot on an X-ray image. The lesion is mostly harmless but can scare the crap out of the patient when it’s mistaken for a tumor. Occasionally the worm can reach the eye or its surrounding tissues. Now, that isn’t much fun but at least it’s pretty rare. Should it happen to you, buy a lottery ticket! In contrast to dogs, there are no reliable tests for screening in humans. Making a diagnosis is based on symptoms and directly examining the lesions caused by the worm. Treatment, if necessary, is surgical. The semen collecting phantom is a fake sow vaguely resembling a real one. It’s used in animal husbandry to stimulate the boar during sperm collection for a better and faster result. I owe special thanks to: Panni Vrabély for assisting me in the creation of the graphics in the little spare time she had. Éva Fok for making sure that I don’t end up saying stupidities. ____________________________________________________ I used the following media not created by me: (by user Heigh-hoo) from Creative Commons 0 Licence () (by user NightVoice) from Creative Commons 0 Licence () (by user galeku) from Creative Commons 0 Licence () Thunder Clap OWB KY (by user Dave Welsh) from Creative Commons 0 Licence () Welsh/sounds/194364/ (by user zombie_expert) from Creative Commons 0 Licence () (copyright by user unchaz) from Attribution Licence () I shortened the audio somewhat. Funeral March (excerpt) (by Frédéric François Chopin, performer unknown) from Royalty Free Licence ()