Reducing Your Parvo Treatment Expenses – Part 1
Parvo (which is correctly known as Canine Parvovirus) is devastating, not only emotionally (words simply cannot do justice to how it feels to see your beloved dog healthy one minute, and incredibly sick the next, with vomit and foul-smelling, blood-filled diarrhea everywhere), but also financially.
As soon as you notice your dog isn’t well, the typical vet’s costs associated with treating Parvo just keep adding up (and up).
To begin with, you’ll probably face bills of $25 to $50 for each office visit, and there will be several.
Then, your vet will no doubt want to do take a fecal matter sample for an immediate, in-office test, or a blood sample to send away for a full work-up, or even both. These will cost you from $25 to $100, depending on the type of test. (Be warned, however, that these tests may not even be accurate – with the latest 2c strain, a dog that has Parvo may still end up testing negative.)
If it turns out your dog actually has Parvo, then you should expect a bill in the region of $500 to over $10,000, per dog. These costs include items such as overnight stays ($50 a night), blood transfusions ($200 a time), medications ($100 – $200), etc. (And your vet will only give your dog a 50% – 80% chance of survival.)
Finally, if the vet is unable to treat your dog successfully, you will often be presented with the option every pet owner dreads – the decision to have your dog put to sleep, which may cost you as much as $300.
So, all together, your vet’s bill for Parvo treatment will be between $850 and $10,450 – for just a single dog. (As many people actually own two or more dogs, and when one of your dogs is infected by Parvo, the chance of any others in the same household getting the virus is very high, you can probably double these figures, at least.)
To put this in perspective, the average cost of owning a dog over its 11-year expected life is approximately $13,550, so you could spend up to 77% (i.e. just over three quarters) of this amount treating him for a single illness over a period of a week or so.
But, it doesn’t have to be that way – you can both prevent Parvo and treat Parvo using safe, chemical-free products such as Parvaid, Life Cell Support and Vibactra Plus for a fraction of the cost of taking your dog to the vet’s, and with a much higher chance of your dog surviving the Parvo virus (typically, 90% or better).
Parvo prevention normally begins when your dog is just a puppy, in the form of vaccinations.
The whole topic of Parvo vaccinations, and vaccinations in general, is much debated at the moment, and there are, of course, many advantages and disadvantages.
But perhaps the most serious downside, where Parvo is concerned, is that most current vaccines (excluding Continuum and PROGARD, which are made by Intervet) are ineffective against the latest 2c strain of this horrific virus.
This means that you need other solutions, because you cannot take it for granted that your dog is safe simply because he’s had all of his shots. Since the beginning of 2007, there has been no shortage of stories in the press of fully-vaccinated dogs, both puppies and adults, being infected by and dying from Parvo.
If you want to find out what these other options are, you’ll need to look out for Part 2 of this article!
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