Risk of Roundworms in Dogs in Licking County, Ohio

Dogs can acquire many types of parasites, such as roundworms, and the rate of infection can vary based on the state you live in such as Ohio, your county such as Licking County, and even can vary within communities such as Newark, Granville, Heath, Hebron or Buckeye Lake.

Roundworms, also called ascarids, are worms with round bodies that live in the dog’s intestines and consume partially digested food. Roundworms can cause weight loss, decreased appetite, vomiting or diarrhea in some dogs while other dogs may be without symptoms. Puppies can die with serious roundworm infections. Roundworms pass eggs in the dog’s stool that must be found with a microscope.

The Companion Animal Parasite Council, often referred to as CAPC, uses data from veterinary testing laboratories in addition to their knowledge of testing in general veterinary practices like ours to determine the rate and risk of common parasitic infections such as roundworms. For more information about how these numbers are generated or CAPC, go to (https://www.capcvet.org).

The risk of Roundworms in Licking County, Ohio, is 4.44%^* (1 out of 23 dogs tested were positive for Roundworms. The risk of Roundworms in the state of Ohio is 2.58%^# (1 out of 39 dog tested positive for Roundworms).

As you can see in the footnote below, these numbers generated by CAPC represent approximately 30% of the cases of roundworms present in Licking County. We believe the risk of Roundworms in Dogs in Licking county is approximately 15% which means about 1 in 6 or 7 dogs may be Positive for Roundworms.

There are other gastrointestinal parasites also with substantial risk in Licking County including Whipworms and Hookworms.

We routinely test for roundworms in our fecal parasite examination. For more information or to have your dogs fecal checked, please Granville Veterinary Clinic at 740-587-1129. We can perform fecal parasite tests in our clinic and often have the results within 1 hour.

* Data is from January 1 to June 25, 2017.

#This number reflects the total number of tests reported to CAPC in this defined area and represents a sample of the total dog/cat population in this area. The data in provided by IDEXX Laboratories and ANTECH Diagnostics. It is statistically significant and it serves as a strong representation of the parasite activity for each area. However, it does not represent the total number of positive tests. Instead, we estimate it represents less than 30% of the activity in the geographic regions. Data displayed for the current year showcases only the current year data. Depending on the time of year, this map view may only represent a small number of testing months.

Data Source: https://www.capcvet.org/parasite-prevalence-maps/