Hello;

Thank you for reading and responding. Regarding your fears, there is nothing to be afraid of. 1) you can cure babesia, but IMO if your dog is still active then I don't know why you'd bother as he could get it again, and 2) regarding dogs "in remission," this same truth applies to coccidia too. If you get a dog with coccidia, and you give it Albon, you have not "cured" the dog either (meaning you have not killed the protozoa, you've only knocked it into remission as well). So I find it curious that people get so alarmed about babesia, just because conventional drugs only knock it into remission, when this exact same truth applies to coccida also. And really, coccidia is much easier to spread everywhere than babesia, because it is transferred through the feces, so all that is required to "spread coccidia" is for you to walk from one chain spot to another with some poop on your shoes ... or to put any pup into a pen where coccidia's been ... and the disease gets spread. Same thing with worms. So honestly, ask yourself why don't you worry and get alarmed about that?

The reason why we don't worry about parasites like worms and coccidia is because we're so used to handling them. We see them all the time, we've heard about them for years, and we know what to treat them with. With babesia, however, we never really hear about this parasite until we get pretty deep into dogs. So it seems new and strange. Worse, the medication to treat it isn't in every feed store and vet catalogue (yet!), so the ability to treat it is much more limited. We actually have to go to the vet (or order the drugs from foreign markets) just to treat our infected dogs. However, because the reality is babesia is everywhere, the rational response to this is not to "worry" about it, but rather to prepare ourselves for it. This is why I cannot stress enough the importance of pre-ordering these drugs in advance, and having them onhand at all times (just like we do for worms and coccidia), because when we do babesia really is no more difficult to control than these other parasite problems we're used to handling.

And finally, regarding the performance aspect, I can think of several dogs that were campaigned and won their Championships with babesia, including SteelCity's Ch Misterman and Xmen's Ch Barbarian, so it will not affect performance if the dog is allowed to recover sufficiently to get his blood count back. Truly, it's not that big of a deal if you know how to handle it and have prepared yourself to do so.

Cheers,

Jack