Worms!!!!!

[Rickky]

Hey guys I jus received an Oustalet chameleon that has worms...I am curious to know how often I can treat with panacur...I treated him 2 days ago and he refuses to eat and drink...he threw up today and the food I tried to feed him was not digested and worms came out around the food....the worms were still alive and I don't knw if I should do another full treatment or half a treatment....also how quickly does this work? Please any info will help...I'm stressing

 

[Blang]

Do you have pictures of the worms? panacur will not kill all types of worms!

 

[Rickky]

Not the exact picture from my chameleon but this is what the worms look like

 

[jajeanpierre]

Do you have an experienced reptile vet guiding you?

In my opinion, no you should not continue to worm him.

Where did he come from? Is he a wild caught and how long has he been in captivity.

Here's the deal with wild caughts. They are all infected with parasites. All of them. A healthy immune system keeps everything in check.

They are captured and kept in sub optimal conditions for who knows how long. They are incredibly stressed. They are over crowded. They don't have enough water. They never ever feel safe. Most of them die.

When an animal is stressed, there is a cascade of hormones that are released. One is cortisol. Stess is not an emotion it is a physiological state. One of the things cortisol does is suppress the immune system. This is why stressed animals get sick. Their immune system is suppressed and disease (or parasites) have nothing to stop them from multiplying and getting out of control.

You would think that worming them at the first opportunity would be a good thing but it will kill your chameleon. I repeat, worming your stressed wild caught before he has a chance to relax and get stabilized (months) will kill your animal.

Chameleons have lived for eons infested with parasites. A healthy immune system keeps it under control. There is some thought that parasites rather than being only a negative actually give something back to the animal. After all, if it weren't for bacteria in your gut, you couldn't digest anything.

Here's what happens when an animal has a massive parasite load. The parasites don't just stay in the gut. Round worms--and you showed pictures of round worms--are ingested as eggs or larvae. Then they go from the gut to various other places in the body. There are no doors in the gut allowing those worms to enter the blood stream/body and leave the massive bacteria load in the gut behind. Parasites pierce the gut. That's right, they make little holes in the gut. They go in the blood stream. They go lots of places. Often they end up in the lungs where they are coughed up and swallowed to grow to their final adult stage in the gut where they reproduce.

Now, all that piercing through the gut into the blood stream and all the attachements they might make to the intestinal wall creates wounds. If a parasite is attached to the intestinal wall, it is covering up a wound. If you kill it, you open up that wound. See where I'm going?

Next there is the massive die off which can cause intestinal blockage. You can also create a toxic situation with a massive die off. There are lots of ways you can kill a chameleon when you try to kill parasites that has nothing to do with the toxicity of the drug.

When I worm wild caughts, I do it very carefully. I am always afraid when I start to worm them. I wait until they are healthy. Months. I give them half a dose and keep my fingers crossed. I might wait two weeks and give them a bit more two days in a row. My goal is not to kill all the parasites, but to maybe kill a few. If I see a lot of worms in the stool I stop and try again in a few weeks. If the animal gives me any sign it is declining, I stop.

So, the short answer is you should stop giving him Panacur and you start trying to save his life because he is now in a crisis. Good luck.

One other thing--the only two wild caughts I've had that didn't thrive for me were the two I wormed very soon after acquiring them because "they" told me if I didn't they would die from the massive parasite load they had. It almost killed them both. It took months and months to get one healthy and the other I have named He Who Would Not Die, so you get the idea of his continuing health status. (One other wild caught that didn't thrive for me was a newly imported melleri that was a mess and dying when he came to me. He was dead less than two weeks after arriving in the US.)