The mite’s game plan is to burrow 3-5 layers deep and attack the hair follicles. Dogs with demodetic mites will experience extensive hair loss and a weakened immune system. The microscopic mange mite usually occurs in all puppies, but especially in puppies from 6 weeks to over a year of age.
Within minutes, eight-legged bloodsuckers will appear in the pores causing a localized infestation at first (if left untreated, these areas can quickly “generalise”, making it a much more serious condition to treat). Veterinary and medical treatments are very expensive and take months to treat with poisons and insecticides.
With demodetic scabies, there is usually a characteristic odor, a kind of “wet puppy dog” smell. Vets can usually diagnose demodex just by looking, although a skin scraping will give a more definitive diagnosis. The itching, although not as severe as that caused by sarcastic mite toxins, can be intense (or there may be no itching at all), and many times demodex can cause serious secondary bacterial infections, not just from the infected pores, but also from infected pores. but from the battered skin of the dog scratching.
Unlike the mites that bite and live on the dog’s blood, the mites that cause demodex do not bite and do not consume the animal’s blood. They live in the skin pores and hair follicles and literally feed on the skin and hair oil they find there.
The moths are similar in appearance to the Narcotic Moth Eater. Notoedres cati is the main cause of mange in cats. It will also infect dogs, but it will not live a full life cycle in humans, but it will cause itchiness and possible rashes. Also known as ‘face scabies’, the infection usually starts at the tips of the ears, progresses across the face and, if left untreated, throughout the body. If your cat is suffering from severe itching or hair loss on the head and neck, you should consider testing him for the neoteric mange mite.
The female mite burrows into the skin and lays eggs several times as she continues to burrow. These tunnels can actually reach the length of several centimeters. After laying the eggs, the female mite dies. In 3-8 days, the eggs hatch into larvae, which have 6 legs. The larvae mature into nymphs, which have 8 legs. The nymph then moults into an adult while still in the burrow. The adult’s partner, and the process continues. The full life cycle requires 2-3 weeks.
Symptoms usually begin with hair loss and itchiness in the ears that quickly spread to the face, eyelids, and neck. The mites can also spread to the feet and lower abdomen. This characteristic spread is probably due to the cat’s habit of grooming itself and sleeping curled up in a ball. As the disease progresses, the skin will thicken, wrinkle, and become covered with greyish/yellowish crusts. Due to the intense itching, the infected cat often scratches and irritates the skin, leading to the development of secondary infections. The surrounding lymph nodes may also become enlarged as the problem worsens.
