Are fleas bothering you and your pets?

I never have a difficult time coming up with a timely, significant topic. Something always happens at work that nudges me to share the story. This week was no exception.

A couple presented their puppy for me to check out because he was continuously scratching. They explained that the puppy slept on their bed at night and this scratching was so bad it kept them awake the previous night. Now I understood why they were the first clients of the morning. As I performed my physical exam, I noticed the puppy's skin appeared to be moving on its own -- not really, there were just so many fleas crawling in and under the fur it looked like the migration of wildebeest on the Serengeti. This was the easiest diagnosis all week, and I started telling the owners how this many fleas on their pet usually coincided with a flea infestation in the house and yard. As I was explaining to the couple how fleas will jump on the nearest warm body to feed, the woman told me she was getting bitten by fleas, too. Suddenly she decided to show me her flea bites and I nearly got flashed.

I hope I can demonstrate some important factors to controlling fleas with this story. The fact is that fleas will feed on people when we're more convenient hosts than our pets. The habits and movement of our pets just usually expose them to more fleas. Only the adult fleas feed on a warm body. This means that most of the flea population is laying around, maturing somewhere in the carpet, under furniture, or in the yard.

Effective flea control should include treating all areas of the flea's environment. Treating the yard and the house may require an exterminator or, at the very least, consultation with your veterinarian.

There is an entire industry built on battling fleas on your pet. The earlier flea control products contained pyrethrins as the active ingredient. These are still in use today, and they do a good job of killing the fleas that are present at the time of application. They just don't have any long-lasting benefits. Newer products have been topical products that work very well and are effective for up to a month. These include Frontline, Advantage, and numerous others. The latest products include unique chemicals which are safer, more deadly (for the fleas), and in some cases last even longer than a month. These include Comfortis, Trifexis, and Nexgard. As this is a growing market, new and better flea control medications are becoming available all the time.

There is no one-size-fits-all protocol. A friend of mine has battled fleas on her dog for two years. I exhausted my efforts trying to figure out where all the fleas were coming from. The house was exterminated and the yard was sprayed regularly over the course of several months. We gave Comfortis tablets religiously each month to the dog. Our best efforts only gave relief for a week or two.

One day it was discovered the neighbors had five dogs living in the backyard. A neighborly visit revealed the problem. Five dogs times thousands of fleas each equals a flea population that no plan can overcome. Now that all the dogs and their yards have been cleared of fleas, everyone's happy -- even the pets' owners.

-- Dr. Richard McCarver is a veterinarian at Siloam Springs Veterinary Clinic. The opinions expressed are those of the author.