Proper preventative measures. Again, if you introduce a new cat into the house, have that checked and de-wormed properly. But preventative measures are products like Revolution Plus, Revolution, and Advantage Multi for cats. They're flea control, some of them do ticks, they do intestinal worms, they do ear mite—all the things that cats can bring or spread amongst themselves. If you treat them accordingly and keep them on an adequate preventative regularly, you should avoid any problems with that.

Yes. So intestinal parasites can be passed on to people. Immediately my mind goes to ... Okay, say an animal, a cat, in this case, has roundworms. They shed roundworm eggs in their stool. I think it's two days or so, give or take a little bit. But let's say that in two days, those roundworm eggs become larvae, and that's infective larvae. Two things can happen. And thankfully, it's not something we see in adults. Unfortunately, it can be seen in children, because they don't always have the same hygiene as we do as adults. But number one, if you were walking around barefooted and maybe you have a cut or any kind of defect on your skin, an abrasion, anything that the skin barrier is compromised, and you step in a pile of infected roundworm poop, that can penetrate the skin, and cause cutaneous lesions. It's called cutaneous larval migrans. But that is something that you will see. And that happen to an adult or a kid.

You can see what’s called ocular larval migrans. And there's another version called visceral larval migrans. They are when an infective roundworm larva is ingested, usually orally. And yes, I'm talking about people the same way. Maybe you were handling the cat's stool. You were cleaning the litter box. You didn't wash your hands properly. If the stool is ingested, it can migrate to those areas, the eye, or your internal organs. And those roundworms will migrate right through specific organism and leave little fibrous tracks. It's a mess. It's a nightmare, and you don't ever want to deal with it or have to deal with it in your kids. The ocular version can cause blindness. And it's permanent—irreversible blindness.

How do you prevent all this scary stuff? You take your cat to the veterinarian, you get them checked, you get them de-wormed, and you keep them on a proper preventative. And we don't worry about it.

Flea control. Can I give you a two-word answer? Flea control. You control it accurately for fleas. And they won't get tapeworms that way. So you should be good to go if you do proper flea control.

Yeah, they can. It's tough because where are they going to get it? Where are they exposed to the feces of an infected animal if they're 100% indoors? It’s retty rare. The most common thing would be those tapeworms that we mentioned. That is the most common thing that we see, the most common parasite in cats that are indoors. It doesn't take much for a flea to come inside. And then again, the way they groom themselves, they're going to probably ingest it. And then they can break with tapeworms after that.

The most likely other scenario I would think is if you introduce a new cat into the household. So you can have this new one that comes in, and little typhoid Mary brings it into the healthy cat that's in the house. And that's what happens. So if you get a new animal introduced to the house, always get them checked at the vet first. Get a good stool sample done first. And then if they are clean, it's okay for everybody to intermingle and hopefully live happily ever after.

Probably the most common method is what's called a fecal-oral route. And yes, it's exactly like it sounds. They have to ingest feces orally to obtain it. And let me be more precise. It's not just any feces; it’s the feces of an infected animal. And in many cases, those fecal eggs or those parasite eggs in the feces have the larvae for a day or two before they become infectious. It's not a hard thing to do. I mean, it happens all the time. And it's not always as deliberate as the cat walking up and eating a pile of stool. I know that sounds disgusting, but they do it. Especially dogs. But it can be as simple as they just stepped in it.

Maybe they share the same litter box as a housemate or littermate. And that animal has it. They go in the same litter box. They're scooting around in there, and they get some on their paw. Well, what's a cat going to do? The first thing that cats will do when they get anything on their body is they're going to stop, and they're going to lick it off. They're going to groom themselves. So, boom, you just got infected that way. So that is the most common reason.

The only exception I would give to those, if we're talking about all the intestinal parasites, is tapeworms, and that’s something we commonly see. The most common thing that we see is dipylidium caninum. That's a tapeworm from fleas. So they have to ingest a flea. Not feces, but a flea. The other type of tapeworm is echinococcus, and the last name is granulosum, I think. But that is something that they usually get from eating the host animal, which is mice. So sometimes you'd have a mouse or cat, maybe a barn cat, something like that. And they ingest a mouse that is happening to harbor this type of tapeworm; they can get it that way.