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Ticks in Los Angeles?

840 views 7 replies 4 participants last post by  Lamont Cyrus 
#1 ·
My 6 month old GSD is being hospitalized for what they think is a tick born disease. We live in west Los Angeles and are wondering if anyone else has heard of ticks in the city? More info about Kora see my post about 104 fever. Experiencing neurological deficits, high white blood cell count, enlarged spleen, lethargy, Anorexia, back legs swollen and lymph’s enlarged
 
#2 ·
yes, they certainly exist there. less common in the city but any wooded park would suffice...

you mentioned foothills? where exactly?

i lived in encino, hollywood, burbank, westlake, venice, brentwood & van nuys. hiked all the surrounding areas. never had a problem to the extent of having to treat my dogs, but certainly pulled off 1-2 a year. american brown dog ticks from what i can recall.
 
#3 ·
yes, they certainly exist there. less common in the city but any wooded park would suffice...

you mentioned foothills? where exactly?

i lived in encino, hollywood, burbank, westlake, venice, brentwood & van nuys. hiked all the surrounding areas. never had a problem to the extent of having to treat my dogs, but certainly pulled off 1-2 a year. american brown dog ticks from what i can recall.
a park in Le Verne she was there for a couple hours. They were about 1000 feet from the foothills themselves. This was on dec 13 and she Threw up on the 14th and ate a bunch of grass in our yard. 4 days later started showing the lethargy and suppressed appetite.
 
#6 ·
I have a cat and a dog. The dog began to scratch itself. My vet advised shampoo and anti-flea collar.
But I decided to buy medicine for both the cat and the anti-flea collar,
to guarantee the safety of my children.
I need all the healthy ones, children, a dog, a cat. I wonder where my dog got infected? She licks everything on the street. And how to immediately understand that she is sick? In order not to transmit the infection to others
 
#7 ·
Y'all have had a wetter than average year in So Cal. That kind of weather tends to bring out ticks. The baby ones are very hard to spot, so you might never even notice if the dog picks one up.

Parasite issues can change rapidly in the environment. Here's an example, from several years back in So Cal: When I lived in So Cal, almost no one kept dogs on HW prevention.The vets offered it, admitted they never saw cases of HW, and that was usually that. Then the year after Hurricane Katrina, multiple dogs in my neighborhood came up with HW disease. There had been flood dogs from New Orleans fostered locally, and they likely transmitted it to the mosquitoes who started spreading it around. Suddenly, every dog really needed to be on HW prevention!

Along the same lines, hardly anyone in So Cal uses tick prevention because it's not usually an issue. Until the year when it becomes an issue....and this might be the year.

Where I live now is an area where vets tend to say "we don't have tick problems." I have never seen a tick on my dogs. Many vets in NOLA and Baton Rouge don't bother recommending tick prevention -- most people simply don't need it, they say. However...our rescue has treated MANY cases of confirmed tick disease in the last two years from dogs coming out of Baton Rouge and New Orleans. So the ticks have to be around -- and they're spreading disease....even though they're not "supposed" to be in the city.

Our rescue's vet thinks a lot of local tick disease cases in areas like ours aren't being diagnosed properly because the symptoms are so vague and the local vets are assuming something that used to be true about the environmental risk is still true -- and it's not, as demonstrated by all the tick profile results we're getting in bloodwork we send out.
 
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