Flea Allergy Dermatitis? What the heck is that?

This past summer Guilty had two bouts of Flea Allergy Dermatitis. The first bout was in June and I didn’t realize what was going on. I was at the UKC Premier and she became really itchy, she would keep up us at night chewing on her back legs and rear. I just thought she came in contact with something that made her itchy. I gave her benedryl and she got over her itchy spell.

The next bout came in July, she again became extremely itchy, so itchy she was creating open sores on her body. I brought her to work with me and had her examined. The doctor did her exam and said as itchy as she is this looks like Flea Allergy Dermatitis. That made me think, at first I was like “she’s on a monthly flea and tick medication she doesn’t have fleas”, then I remembered the day before I was out checking the raccoon traps around the chicken pen as we had some raccoons get in our pen and they killed all our chickens, pheasants and guinea hens. There was a raccoon in one of the traps and I took care of it, the pooches were with me when checking the traps. When I went back in the house and sat down I felt something crawling on me. I looked and there was a flea crawling on me so if there was a flea on me there very well could be a flea on Guilty as she stuck her face right into the raccoon.

Guilty had broken out from the topical flea and tick medication so I started using an oral flea and tick product on her. Since it is an oral medication the fleas and ticks need to bite the dog in order to ingest the medication that will kill them. So when the flea bit  Guilty she had a reaction to the saliva in the flea bite. The allergic reaction does a number to the skin. After her physical exam and the sores were examined the doctor took some samples of her infected skin to look for different things.

A skin scraping was done to check for mites which was negative, a tape prep was taken to look for yeast which was negative then a impression smear was taken to look for bacteria and infection and bingo that is what I found when I looked at the slide under the microscope. The slide above is a picture of what I was looking at. The purple segmented things in the picture are white blood cells, and the purple dots are cocci which are a type of bacteria. Usually you seen a rare number of cocci on the skin as all skin has bacteria, it’s when the balance is off and you get more bacteria on the skin an infection starts, the white blood cells come in when the infection is bad to clean it up.

Guilty was put on an antibiotic for the infection, an antibacterial shampoo for a topical wash for her skin and an steroid to calm the extreme itch.

She needed baths twice a week. Antibiotics were given for two weeks as well as the steroid.

The steroid that was given to Guilty was prednisone. You start out at a high dose to combat the itch then you decrease the dose after time and decrease it more and more until you wean them off of it. You have to be very careful when giving your dog a steroid and taking them off of it. You need to follow your veterinarians orders to the t as this steroid is already made in the body. The adrenal glands make steroids for your body to live, when given an synthetic steroid the adrenal glands stop making steroid so the body doesn’t get to much. You need to wean the steroid down so the adrenal glands have a chance to start producing it on there own again. If not weaned down and abruptly stopped then it can send the body into Addison’s Disease which is a condition of the adrenal glands not producing the steroid. This is a deadly disease if left untreated so you need to follow your veterinarians directions whenever given a steroid to your canine. Some side effects of prednisone is increased drinking and urination, increase hunger, panting. Guilty had all these signs and we needed to make sure she got outside often or she would pee her pants. Once you start weaning down the medication the symptoms will get better.

Guilty cleared up nicely from her Flea Allergy Dermatitis. She did loose a bunch of fur from the ordeal so we are working at getting her fur to grow back.

Since she now has Flea Allergy Dermatitis she should be on a topical flea and tick medication so the fleas are repelled and killed before they bite.