What are the advanced symptoms of canine distemper?

Answer 1

Distemper can be misdiagnosed in its early stages because it begins as an pper respiratory infection resembling a cold, including fever of 103 - 105 degrees (normal for a dog is 100 - 102.5) loss of appetite, listlessness, and a watery discharge from eyes and nose, but dogs do not get colds like people do, so if these symptoms arise with a puppy, call the vet clinic immediately! Within a few days, the discharge runs yellow and becomes thick and sticky and the pup has a dry cough, and may have diarrhea and vomiting. Within the first 2 weeks of the disease, the symptoms fluctuate.

Some dogs shake off the disease after this stage, but others progress into pneumonia and neurological involvement. Seizures, encephalitis, partial paralysis, head-tilting, chorea (jerking or twitching) and other neurological signs can follow. Some dogs also experience a hardening of the nose leather and the footpads. Even if the initial disease had been mild, these symptoms can show up weeks later.

The virus can also persist in the system, attacking the spleen, thymus gland and lymph nodes of the immune system and creating immune deficiencies that allow bacterial infections to gain hold.

AnswerThe most advanced stage of distemper is death. This can be avoided by getting your dog to the vet to get his shots on schedule. If you don't do this, there are a number of nasty, fatal illnesses out there eager to relieve you of the burdens of dog ownership. By getting the vaccination, you can skip all that stuff about the symptoms of the disease, and go take your dog for a walk.

Be careful, even vaccinations are not safe sometimes. In case of my 1.5 yrs old boxer, the doctor gave her vaccination for Distemper when she was running a slight fever, and this caused the virus to hit her hard. This was her 4th distemper vaccination, and yet still, it hit her so hard that she died within a month.