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Page 1 of 4 For millions of pets and people, the tiny flea is a remorseless enemy. The flea is a small, brown, wingless insect that uses specialized mouth parts to pierce the skin and siphon blood.
When a flea bites your pet, it injects a small amount of saliva into the skin to prevent blood coagulation. Some animals may have fleas without showing discomfort, but an unfortunate number of pets become sensitized to this saliva. In highly allergic animals, the bite of a single flea can cause severe itching and scratching. Fleas cause the most common skin disease of all pets - flea allergy dermatitis.
If your pet develops hypersensitivity to flea saliva, several changes may result:
- A small hive may develop at the site of the fleabite, which either heals or develops into a tiny red bump that eventually crusts over.
- The pet may scratch and chew at herself until the area is hairless, raw, and weeping serum ("hot spots"). This can cause hair loss, redness, scaling, bacterial infection, and increased pigmentation of the skin. The distribution often involves the lower back, base of the tail, toward the back, the abdomen, flanks, and neck. It may become quite generalized in severe cases, leading to total body involvement.
 Remember that the flea spends most of its life in the environment, not on your pet, so it may be difficult to find. In fact, your pet may continue to scratch without you ever seeing a flea on her/him. Check your pet carefully for fleas or signs of flea excrement (also called flea dirt), which looks like coarsely ground pepper. When moistened, flea dirt becomes reddish brown because it contains blood. If one pet in your household has fleas, assume all of the pets in your household have them as well. A single flea found on your pet means that there are likely hundreds or thousands of fleas, larva, pupa, and eggs in your house.
Some facts about fleas:
- One flea can produce more than 2,000 eggs in it's lifetime.
- 95% of flea stages are present in the environment rather than on the pet. These environmental stages can survive up to 365 days.
- Fleas can reproduce indoors in many climates year-round.
Fleas can cause more than just itching. Young kittens can become anemic if heavily infested with fleas. More importantly, fleas can carry Tapeworms. If you see tapeworm segments (they resemble rice segments) in your pet's stool, he/she may have had fleas at one time, or may still have them. Through grooming or biting, the animal ingests an adult flea containing tapeworm eggs. Once released, the tapeworm grows to maturity in the small intestine. The cycle can take less than a month, so a key to tapeworm prevention is flea control.
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