Categories: Pets

Dogs Cannot Transmit Pinworms to People

It’s a common misconception that if a child gets pinworms, it’s all the fault of the dog of the cat. These pets are innocent, because pinworms can only live in the guts of primates, not in the digestive tracts of dogs and cats. The many types of worms that dogs and cats can get include tapeworms, hookworms, whipworms, roundworms and heartworms. Neither dogs nor cats can even transmit the worms to a person or to other dogs and cats. But how did this misconception come about?

Worm Look-alikes

Also called threadworms, pinworms in humans look like little moving grains of white rice that crawl out from the person’s anus. Tapeworms in dogs look particularly like little moving grains of white rice that crawls out of the dog’s anus. From the perspective of an exasperated caretaker of both people with pinworms and dogs with tapeworms, it would seem like one little white worm is the same as another little white worm.

In order to tell the difference between pinworms (Enterobius vermiculars) and tapeworms (Dipylidium caninum), you have to really get up close and personal with them. This is something that the average person is probably not going to want to do unless you have a strong stomach, a powerful microscope and an encyclopedic knowledge of worm species.

One main difference between the two species is overall body length. According to the Centers for Diseace Control, an adult pinworm is the length of a staple. But the length of an adult tapeworm is six inches. Those little grains or rice are little segments shed off from the adult tapeworm still in the dog’s gut. These segments can move a bit, but they are not independent worms they are generally pouches filled with eggs.