Meds causing mite prob

Keymaster

Katherine,
I am sorry to be so late in responding, I was out of town on vacation and in an area of poor cell reception.

I know exactly what you are seeing and what is happening to Toby. The same things happened with Chance. Look at this page and scroll down to look at the photo of him on the lower right side when he was at the worse of his disease. The picture at the top of the page is one year AFTER he recovered.
https://www.secondchanceaihadogs.com/our-stories/chance/

Immunosuppressive drugs like prednisone, atopica and others reduce the numbers of certain white blood cells in the body that are responsible for the attack on red blood cells. Some drugs accomplish this via a cytotoxic (destroy the cell) action on the cells. Some antiobiotics reduce the number of bacteria by negatively impacting their growth cycle. In any case, cells that normally reproduce rapidly such as skin and digestive tract cells can be severely impacted by the actions of these drugs.

Dogs that normally have coats that consist of hair, not fur, can have serious problems during treatment for AIHA, IMHA and bone marrow failure. Chance was a Giant Schnauzer and he had hair. Your Labradoodle Toby is a mix with the Poodle breed and they also have hair not fur. So these “haired” typed dogs are really seriously impacted by the medications we use to treat them. Their coats fall out, they stop growing hair to replace, the skin dries out leaving a brillo-type coat. So Chance stopped growing hair, his elbows were open raw wounds. His coat changed to something like brillo pads.

You are clearly seeing the same things with Toby, flanks getting thin, raw elbows, his coat is blown. Eventually I was embarrassed at how bad Chance looked. I feared that people thought I was mistreating him. It was a very sad time for me and I know you must be feeling the same way. Putting a t-shirt on him in public may help you feel better.

Avoid doing any major hair cutting or grooming until you have the infections under control. The skin and the hair follicles are very delicate right now. To control the scruffy coat once he began to recover I bought some spray on conditioner from the show world called The Stuff Dog Conditioner. It smells light and isn’t greasy. I would spray this on and gently comb it through his coat.

Part of Chance’s condition was that in addition to not making red blood cells he also stopped making white blood cells. He was constantly on antibiotics to prevent him from getting opportunistic infections similar to what we hear about in very sick humans who have diseases like AIDS. His immune system was blank and he could not fight infections at all. He developed many areas of staph infection that oozed and the skin fell out. We rotated through many different types of antibiotics for him. Skin infections require a different antibiotic than would be used to treat a tick disease (doxycycline) or digestive problem (metrondiazole.) That is why vets generally like to get a skin scraping for a skin condition or a stool or urine sample to test for those conditions. This is how they pick an antibiotic.

In our daily lives, healthy humans and dogs all have staph bacteria (and many other bacteria, yeasts and viruses) on our skin normally. Our immune systems keep these populations under control and we never know that they exist. It is when we become ill that we are susceptible to these many invaders that are on and in our bodies.

So any dog taking prednisone is at high risk for expressing staph infections. Vally sent you to the link with the pictures of the way this can look. Again, staph is normally on our skin but Toby can’t defend himself from it. You must use a medication to treat this. There are some serious strains of staph infections called MRSA that can become very bad infections in dogs. Once a dog gets to this point, it can take heroic efforts to treat them.

Follow the instructions to treat staph carefully that I put in the glossary for Staph Infections. Toby is at risk of not only contracting staff but he could also be passing it off to any elderly person, immune suppressed individual or very young child in your household. Your vet probably has a favorite antibiotic to treat with. I used Cephalexin for Chance and it worked very well. His wounds stopped oozing and the skin began to heal up, the hair took longer to respond. Treatment is about 10 days.

Mites, as in demodex, sometimes called mange, are (again) on every dog (and human) in the world. However their populations are kept under control by a robust immune system. It is known that in certain breeds and certain dogs, they are born with a predisposition to expressing demodex mites in a very serious way. This genetic fault shows up as invasive infections very early in life, as puppies. These dogs sometimes require heroic treatments called dips to control. Your vet is anxious to avoid this right now because it is a serious chemical treatment. Or they are given high doses of medication to keep the populations under control.

Some of the breeds that are more susceptible are Afghan Hound, American Pit Bull Terrier, American Staffordshire Terrier, Boston Terrier, Boxer, Collie, Chihuahua, Dalmatian, Doberman Pinscher, English Bulldog, German Shepherd Dog, Great Dane, Old English Sheepdog, Pug and Shar-Pei. I don’t see the LabraDoodle on this list.

I would like to see a few pictures of Toby’s coat up close if you can. I want to figure out which parts are staph, which parts are “hair” issues and which parts are mites. Upload them on the right side bar of this page, be sure to give them a title so we know who they belong to. I won’t post these pictures publicly but I want to see them privately.
my best, patrice

Details