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flea control
Species: other | Category: general | Submitted: 03-Oct-07 10:01PM | viewed 5893 times
Q Evelyn asks:
Sellers on Ebay are offering to sell Frontline Plus for large dogs along with instructions for dividing the dosage down to the appropriate amount for a cat. The idea is to derive eight feline-strength doses from one tube of large dog dosage. If the measurements are made accurately, is this a safe way to treat cats for fleas?
Q Samantha says: No. I would never recommend using this product "off-label" in such a way. There are several things which could potentially go wrong with this kind of thing. First - how do you know exactly how much product you are dosing each cat with? One cat could end up with too much and another with too little product. The volumes you are dealing with are small and difficult to measure accurately in the home environment. Secondly what happens when the product is stored but open? Have you got eight cats to dose at the same time? If not you will have to store the product and it could spoil if opened and not used for any length of time. I do not know what happens in this situation with Frontline or the risk of spoilage/ adverse effects/ efficacy etc so it is impossible for me to advise you in this specific case. However it is often the case that drugs stored incorrectly or too long can be spoiled by bacterial contamination or perhaps simply become ineffective over time.

When reading the data sheet for Frontline for dogs it states specifically not to use the dog product for cats due to the risk of overdosing and states that "the risk of adverse effects may increase when overdosing, so animals should always be treated with the correct pipette size according to body-weight". If you go ahead and buy Frontline for dogs then use it on your cats you might save a bit of money but would it really be worth it if your cat suffered for it?

I would beware of unscrupulous dealers out there wanting to make "a quick buck" out of you and your cats without caring about the consequences once they have their cash! I also wonder if these people should really be selling Frontline at all, since it has a legal category of NFA-VPS; this means only vets, pharmacists or specially qualified people should be selling it; these people are unlikely to make such recommendations when it is specifically contraindicated in the data sheet.

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