| | Published July 4th, 2012
| Flea Control
| | By Mona Miller, DVM |  | | Illustration Amanda Griggs
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My first job in a veterinary hospital was as kennel help for our family veterinarian - I had the distinct and sole responsibility of giving all the dogs (and some cats!) their flea baths and dips to rid them of these pesky creatures. It was not at all a glorious job, and fairly smelly too, clothed in a plastic tarp with plastic gloves and a face mask. Thank goodness we have come a long way since then, with the ability to provide safer and more effective methods of flea and tick control. These methods include topical spot-on products and oral medications; each has their own advantage and place in flea control. Often multiple products can be used simultaneously to attack different stages of the flea life cycle. This approach is generally recommended for a number of reasons: to lessen the possibility of chemical resistance that fleas can develop, to lessen the load of fleas both on your pet and in your environment, and to manage pets that have a severe individual hypersensitivity to flea bites (known as flea allergy dermatitis).
The most widely used products nowadays are the topical spot-on pesticides. These are veterinary-supervised products, meaning that a licensed veterinarian must be associated with the facility selling these products but does not need to be physically present - this allows warehouses and large stores to stock and sell these items. Most of these topical spot-on products repel and kill adult fleas on contact or shortly after taking a meal. These generally have an effective period of about a month, and have taken the place of flea collars and dips.
For pets that have an overload of fleas, it is often recommended to give an oral medication that will kill adult fleas that bite within 30-90 minutes. There are a couple of products that have different lengths of duration, from 24 hours to up to 30 days. The 24-hour product can be compared to a flea shampoo bath that quickly gets fleas off the dog.
Indirect environmental flea control can be achieved by giving your dog or cat an oral medication that gets absorbed into the bloodstream and will last a month. When an adult flea takes its blood meal, this chemical gets transmitted into its eggs and damages the outer wall so that the egg dies before it can hatch out. This method is comparable to the old-fashioned flea house bombs.
Because there are such a variety of flea products on the market, with different mechanisms of action and different potential warnings about side effects, I strongly recommend that you consult with your veterinarian about a specific flea problem your pet might have, as well as routine flea prevention. There are two special warnings I will provide, though: not all flea products are equal in safety and efficacy, and cats are not small dogs when it comes to flea products. It is very important to use a cat product on a cat and to dose appropriate for body weight (the same is true for dogs). I do not recommend trying to split a large cat size tube for two small cats - any pennies saved are not worth the possible hundreds of dollars spent treating a cat for flea product toxicity.
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 | | Dr. Mona Miller lives in Lafayette with her young son, two cats and Luka a new puppy. She has worked at Four Seasons Animal Hospital in Lafayette since moving here in 2001. She attended Cal as an undergrad, and received her DVM from U.C. Davis. She can be reached at Four Seasons, 938-7700, or by email to MonaSDVM@aol.com.
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Lamorinda Weekly, Moraga CA