[raygezer]

hi i have just been to check on my sheep an lambs and found one of my lambs scourin quite badly wen i inspected it it has flat worms in it they look like segments joined up they were all wormed on 16 april any ideas on whats not worked and what to do next bearin in mind i live in france so not the same medicines .first time in three years. now im thinking what havnt i done !!!! thanx

[suziequeue]

Sounds like tapeworm to me if it is segmented and flat. Often looks like grains of rice.

[raygezer]

if its tapeworm what do i have to get for them.

[FiB]

All of the group 1 (white) wormers seem to do tapeworm - but I am not sure you would treat for it as it doesn't cause the sheep problems. (maybe not the cause of scours? Our ewes have the shitiest bums imaginable but NO egg count - vet says it is just the fresh grass coming through - our lambs are clean so far but only 4-8 weeks old so prob still mostly on milk).  Have a look at the SCOPS wormer leaflet in this post - may help... http://www.accidentalsmallholder.net/forum/index.php?topic=34045.0  Good luck Fi

[SallyintNorth]

Some of the wormers will kill tapeworms - check the labels, but any damage is already done by the time you see the segments in their poo.  Mostly such damage is asymptomatic in sheep, but you may get notification from the abbatoir of 'tenuiscous cysts', which are caused by the worms as they migrate through the sheep's body.  Occasionally one of these cysts develops somewhere where it causes a problem - like the brain - or in a part of the animal you want to eat.

There is a more grave condition arising from tapeworm, in which the whole carcase is riddled with small cysts and has to be condemned as unfit for human consumption, but I think this is pretty rare - at least, it is in Britain.

To prevent your sheep getting tapeworm in future, it's the dogs you need to worm; any dogs running where there are sheep should be wormed every three months.

[sh3ph3rd]

they were all wormed on 16 april

I haven't used commercial wormers so forgive my ignorance, but is it at all possible that this tapeworm was expelled after taking its time to die from that worming you mentioned?

it has flat worms in it they look like segments joined up

If they were just segments I'd assume they were live reproductive segments but if whole tapeworm have been expelled there's a better chance you did in fact successfully worm the sheep. Maybe it just took a while to die. It took a fair while after worming my brother's dog for a whole tapeworm to come out; the pup was 10 weeks old and the tapeworm was two metres long, and live, probably because we used natural wormers instead of chemicals. Shifted the worm but didn't kill it, so we burned it. We'd only caught the pup soon before worming it, she was a plump feral, sibling to my skeletal one.

[bizzielizzie66]

Hi....

Regardless of whether you are in France or not, I am sure the chemical names will be the same : white drenches come from the Benzimadazole group - Fenbendazole is what is in Panacur 10% suspension, which will treat tapeworm - also very good for Nematodirus Battus - and it's high risk time of year for that. Nothing you've done wrong specifically probably - depends what you've used in the past. As FiB said SCOPS leaflet very helpful.

Au revoir 

[raygezer]

hi have been to vets he gave me hapadex looked on tinter:net seems to cover most things so jst as a precaution all done now correct dose.i have returned them to the same field i am going to leave them there for the next 24 hrs before moving to another field is that  long enough ? thanx again all