How to Treat Ear Mites in Cats

Video transcription

Hey, I'm Dr. Bob Pane, a veterinarian at Southkendall.com. Let's talk about how to treat or cure ear mites in cats. Ear mites are caused by otodectes. Otodectes is a mite that can get in your environment and you can feel like you got rid of it and it really isn't gone. So you need to treat topically. You need to treat also the environment. So you need to go to your veterinarian and find out what the best products, some of the products over-the-counters you see in the pet stores aren't very good. Usually you have to treat for 30 days because that's the gestation period of a mite. So you have to clean the ears at least once a day. Sometimes you can get away with some medications claim you can use it one time. There's a product called milomite that you can use once and it gets rid of it. I find what happens with treatment of ear mites is sometimes they get yeast and bacteria secondary to all the blood that goes down in their ears because the mites are blood sucking parasites and they're defecation is full of blood and bacteria so we have got to treat the infection as well. So not only treat the mites but the secondary infections because a lot of times we got rid of the mites and now we have the secondary infection. It's worse than the mite infection. So sometimes I'll use a thing called Revolution or Advantage for the ear mites topically but will also give things like Iromectin orally or injectable and sometimes I'll use shampoos, but obviously we use topical medications for the ear infections that sometimes occur afterwards. So we use a multimodal approach to treat ear mites in most cats and we usually check and make sure they got rid of them in a month and make sure they're gone. But you have got to get the environment, cleaning the cracks and crevices where they may lay eggs and the eggs may hatch, three, four, five weeks later and then reinfection your cat without knowing. But you have got to get the mites off the cat because a lot of times they lay their eggs and they stick to the tail and they'll wake up three weeks later anyway. So go to your veterinarian and find out what the multimodal approach would be and then use his or her recommendations.