Panacur de-wormer?

reptileman

Avid Member
Does anyone know the dosage to use of panacur if your treating a wild caught panther chameleon, I am planning on getting some wild caughts and treating them and need to know the right amount to give them.
 
Does anyone know the dosage to use of panacur if your treating a wild caught panther chameleon, I am planning on getting some wild caughts and treating them and need to know the right amount to give them.

I use 50mg per kilo of bodyweight - you can repeat every 2 weeks until you get a negative test for parasites
 
If you just go ahead and treat the chameleon with panacur (or any other medicine used for parasites) you may be giving it unnecessarily or you may not be killing all the parasites that it had. Panacur doesn't work on all parasites.
 
You beat me to it Kinyonga. ;) Better to run a fecal first so you know are targeting the correct parasites. A cham with coccidia won't be helped by panacur for example.
 
While we're on the topic, what's the likelihood of a cham becoming infected with parasites via their food - All of my feeders are ordered specifically as feeders, I don't use any wildcaught or anything like that...

I guess the chance is slim but he should be routinely wormed as I do my dogs/rabbit/guinea pigs and whatever else I guess...
 
odds are slim of your cham getting parasites from feeders, even wild caught.

This is because most parasites are very specific about species they can infect. So, most parasites found in the wild in your part of the world are not going to infect a chameleon which is from a different part of the world. Most parasites the UK would not even be adapted to living in a lizard at all.

You hear rumors to the contrary- especially stories of people who believe their lizard was infected with parasites from purchased food items.

This is highly unlikely- more likely if the feeders were purchased from a pet shop, somebody had unclean hands and left cysts on the feeders after messing with wild caught lizards and carrying cysts around on their skin.

Very much more likely than the petshop scenario- the lizard had parasites to begin with when when it left the hands of the breeder. Nearly all lizards carry them, just not in high numbers in healthy lizards. Many are nearly impossible to completely irradicate, especially in situations where many lizards are kept in cages that have been used for years that are not sterile (that's nearly every cage unless you get a plastic tub and constantly bleach clean it until you have treated the lizard inside for weeks and completely kill off every parasite, hopefully). And especially in these situations where the breeder must move from one cage to the next cleaning and feeding every day.

Most parasites only become a problem when the lizard's immune system becomes compromised (stress, poor temperatures, unclean or improper husbandry in some other way).

Still, it wouldn't hurt to have a fecal once or twice a year and assess if treatment might be a good option at that time. A fecal at the end of the summer after feeding wild caught food for example.
 
Thanks for that info :) I guess theres also the risk of things like the soil in the plants and stuff and I guess he's got more chance of contracting parasites from me (not me having them personally, but introducing them into his environment).

I'll treat him routinely for parasites twice a year (or get faecal tests done to see if he needs treatment)

Thanks again!
 
If you just go ahead and treat the chameleon with panacur (or any other medicine used for parasites) you may be giving it unnecessarily or you may not be killing all the parasites that it had. Panacur doesn't work on all parasites.

Kinyonga, I would have agreed to this, but I have spoken to a Vet about it before when she gave my girlfriend panacur to her WC K.Multi. She said it would be perfectly fine treating all chameleons on the same schedual posted right above you. I've worked with two herp vets, and this one I trusted so much more, so I am just passing on the information to you, but I still respect your theology on it. Like I said, I would have agreed with you in the past :)
 
fluxlizard said..."This is because most parasites are very specific about species they can infect. So, most parasites found in the wild in your part of the world are not going to infect a chameleon which is from a different part of the world"....while this is generally true, there are insects that migrate from one area of the world to another (locusts for example) and would take/pick up parasites from the different areas that they visited along the way. Also, some parasites that are not specific to a certain animal can cause even more problems than one that it was used to since they (non-specific) can migrate (inside the animal) to areas of the animal that they would not normally be in.

Its hard to find a chameleon example...but this illustrates what I'm talking about. Baylisascaris procyonis (a raccoon parasite for example)...when it ends up in humans can survive and cause nerve damage and even death...
http://curezone.com/forums/am.asp?i=1426007

ChameleonsInMyHouse said..."Kinyonga, I would have agreed to this, but I have spoken to a Vet about it before when she gave my girlfriend panacur to her WC K.Multi. She said it would be perfectly fine treating all chameleons on the same schedual posted right above you. I've worked with two herp vets, and this one I trusted so much more, so I am just passing on the information to you, but I still respect your theology on it. Like I said, I would have agreed with you in the past."...I have worked with many vets over the 20+ years that I have kept reptiles/chameleons....and all the good ones have agreed that a shot-gun approach is not really a good thing. (I've dealt with a couple of ones along the way who had no/little experience with reptiles.) Panacur can be given as a shot-gun approach....and providing the reptile has a mild case of the parasite, and its a parasite that panacur will kill it will not likely cause the reptile any harm. However...panacur still will not kill all the normal parasites that a chameleon might be carrying. In addition to this, if the parasite load is heavy (and I don't know how you can tell this without a test) the chameleon can die from its system trying to cope with the "garbage" overload that it has to get rid of created from the dead parasite bodies...so IMHO, its still best to run a fecal and treat the specific parasites involved and treat it in a manner that will hopefully not kill the chameleon. (Also...its not a theology that I presented.)
 
Chamsinmyhouse - I agree 100% with Kingyonga on this one. As much as I stick by the vets, that's still only one person's opinion, and it may have changed if it had been a different situation. Recommendations by vets are catered to individual patients and circumstances and are not the same for every case.

Prophylactically deworming isn't as much of a concern in a well hydrated, seemingly healthy looking animal - which is not always the case in wc chams as I'm sure you know. Deworming a cham that's dehydrated or not up to par immunologically can have detrimental effects and it's generally not recommended by the medical community without knowing what types of parasites you are dealing with. Deworming a heavy parasite burden, even in a healthy looking animal too quickly can cause anaphylactic shock or other problems, as kingyonga said. Especially in a stressed, malnourished animal. It's even one the primary concerns when treating dogs for heartworms, and dogs are far more resilient than chameleons. You should always run a fecal first. They're not that expensive and you may find parasites that panacur doesn't even treat, like coccidia. Well worth it imo.
 
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