This is how our family contracted giardia, from our dogs..

What were your symptoms? And did all of you have the same symptoms?

What was your treatment too?

Giardia is present in every single sewage farm in the country now, because of our large immigrant population and also because we travel to exotic 3rd world countries now where giardia is endemic. It only needs 1 person's faeces infected with giardia to contaminate the whole sewage farm. The sewage sludge, the solids, which consist not only of human faeces contaminated with giardia, but every other bacterium, pathogen, protozoan, parasite known to man plus industrial chemicals, carcinogenic materials, engine oil, battery acid, you name it, it gets flushed (illegally) down the lavatory in many factories etc. etc., is partially treated - note the word partially - and then spread on the fields as a nitrogen fertiliser. The partial treatment does NOT kill the giardia spores, so if you enjoy a bowl of cornflakes of a morning, you are doubtless eating corn that was fertilised with human poo poo - nice! When they spread this stuff on the fields, it goes everywhere of course, into our gardens, onto the footpaths, bridleways, everywhere. You will see lumps of it lying everywhere - to be eaten by our dogs, rabbits, birds. This is how our family contracted giardia, from our dogs, who pick it up on their paws from the footpaths and bridleways along which the tractor and trailer spreading the HSS has driven, dropping the stuff off the wheels, and then they bring it into the house on their paws, they lick their paws, they ingest spores of giardia, they become infected with giardia, they lick us - however careful you are not to let your dog lick your face, they will still get a crafty one in on your fingers, and unless you wash your hands IMMEDIATELY, invariably the giardia - and other nasties too - will get into your body through mucous membranes, if not directly into your mouth. It is terribly infectious, you can get giardia either of course from the live protozoa by drinking contaminated water or faecal matter, or by ingesting the cysts which will embed themselves into the gut wall and make you very poorly. So yes, it is contracted from faecal matter - either directly or indirectly.

Normal disinfectant will not kill the spores or the giardia themselves, you need to use quaternary disinfectant, which you can buy cheaply online.

....and strangely enough Nikki, since we moved here in May, I can honestly say I too have seen no further signs of this with Zena, (except for one episode way back in June when I think she just needed one more final dose to get rid of her infection she had back in March of this year). When I look back to just how much my dogs were suffering with this in our old house, it was ever since our local farmer, less than half a mile away, was also using this human slurry on his fields

Hopefully, there won't be any more of it now for us either, because there are no farms near to me here, only woodland and parks and a big nature reserve, and I'm sure none of those will be using it!

I do know that Zena used to be a bit partial to fox poo when it was left on our driveway at the old house, and foxes do carry this disease, along with rabbits, who of course, would eat from that farmer's fields, so the cycle continued.

We didn't have Tai when the giardia first spread, just Ben, but poor Tai was very, very ill. He ended up on a drip in the vet's. We took in 3 poo samples, and from these the vet diagnosed giardia. We then self-diagnosed ourselves as to why we were feeling so crap, why our faeces stank to high heaven, why we were losing weight (no harm there!), went to the GP, the GP said to us it's a no-brainer, and put us on a course of Metronidazole which did the trick but made us feel really, really ill, so now when we get giardia we take the Panacur as well because it works so much better than the human treatment!

Dog symptoms are of course diarrhoea, foul, yellow, stinky, mucousy stools, horrendous breath, vomiting (not always), general malaise, and eventual weight loss. Left untreated, it will kill.

Human symptoms are diarrhoea - stinking like you could never imagine - with the mucous, you feel like crap, if you drink alcohol you get a blinding headache, weight loss.

We have kept the dogs and ourselves giardia-free now for a couple of years - why? Because the farmer has not spread HSS on the fields for the past 2 years ... simples!!