ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, September 5, 1996 TAG: 9609050035
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEVE SAKSON ASSOCIATED PRESS
JENNY Moshak was getting desperate.
Her golden retriever, Rehab, and her collie mutt, Buddy, were rife with fleas and nothing seemed to get rid of them.
``It was to the point where we were bombing the house almost every week and shampooing them twice a week,'' said Moshak, 31, an athletic trainer from Seymour, Tenn., who often hikes with her dogs. ``The whole ordeal of covering the dishes and food and leaving the house for how many hours ... Then I started wondering, how good is this for me?''
Moshak's story is all too familiar many of the 110 million Americans who own a dog or cat.
In recent years, they've been spending more than $1 billion annually on powders, collars, foams, dips, sprays and bombs. Yet fleas and ticks keep coming back.
Some pet owners have unwisely tried multiple remedies at once, sickening their pets, their children and themselves.
Sensing a keen, unmet demand, drug companies told their scientists to come up with something better. In the past year, their work has come to fruition in an array of new products.
``They are dramatically safer. They're much more friendly to the environment and they're highly effective compounds,'' said Dr. Richard Ford, professor of veterinary medicine at North Carolina State University.
Most of the products go after fleas because they represent the biggest annoyance. Some also target ticks.
Though spring is the best time to stop fleas, if you've got them, they're probably at their peak right about ... now, says Anne Zajac, an associate professor and parasitologist at the Virginia/Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine. "The Southeastern United States always has the worst fleas," she said, because the climate is most to their liking.
"When the nights start getting cool, they'll slow down," she said. But the humid summer has been helpful to them.
So here are some products that should be helpful to you.
Getting the most attention is a drug called Program, by Switzerland's Ciba Geigy Ltd. that is fed to pets once a month and stops fleas from reproducing. Moshak switched to Program earlier this year. ``Since then we've seen zero fleas,'' she said.
Other innovations include a fast-acting flea killer called Advantage that is made by the German drug company Bayer AG and works for a month.
Frontline, by France's Rhone Merieux Inc., kills fleas for one to three months and ticks for a month.
While vets agree these products are important innovations, they stress that fighting pet pests remains a multi-step challenge that requires attacking them at different stages in their life cycle.
Fleas are a good example. While they are usually chomped by the jaws of their itchy host within a week, they can lay 25 or more eggs per day.
The eggs quickly fall off onto the carpet or back yard, along with undigested blood particles excreted by their parents. Here, over the next two or three weeks, they hatch into larvae, feast on the feces of their parents, and eventually develop into an adult.
These new adults jump on your pet and the cycle begins again. Unchecked, there can be thousands of fleas or larvae in your home within weeks.
Traditionally, pet owners have used insecticides known as pyrethrins and organophosphates, but fleas have built up resistance to many of these so they only work for a few days. In some stages of their growth cycle, the larvae are impervious to house bombs and foggers.
Deer ticks, which spread dangerous Lyme disease, can't live much more than 24 hours indoors, but some non-disease carrying ticks are nearly as hardy as cockroaches and can jump on and off your pets for weeks, said Thomas Mather, an entomologist with the University of Rhode Island.
One common, but dangerous, solution is combining insecticides from the same family.
``People take the dog to the vet to have him dipped. Then they put a flea collar on and dust the dog. Here you've given him a triple whammy and we have seen fatal reactions to that - seizures, unconsciousness, respiratory arrest,'' Ford said.
In rarer cases, the same symptoms have affected people.
``I hate the idea of a pet with these chemicals and a child snuggling, and petting the animal, then touching their face with their hands and eating,'' said Dr. Kim Rosenthal, a Manhattan veterinarian.
Among the new generation of products, Program has thus far proven the most popular, even though it doesn't kill adult fleas and doesn't work on ticks at all.
Program is an insect growth regulator, which means it make the fleas that feed on your pet sterile, breaking the cycle of infestation.
Sold as a monthly pill or solution, Program is served with the pet's meal and gets into the blood stream. When the fleas start sucking the animal's blood, the chemical disables their reproductive mechanism by preventing development of the fleas' outer skeletons.
``It's kind of a birth control pill,'' said Roger Meola, professor of entomology at Texas A&M University.
Other insect growth regulators such as Precor and Nylar can be sprayed on the pet or throughout the home or yard to prevent larvae from developing into adult fleas.
But since these chemicals don't kill adult fleas, they can take up to three months to have a major impact. As a result, vets often recommend combining them with an insecticide.
Here's where Advantage and Frontline come in. Both kill nearly all fleas within 24 hours and keep on killing them for at least a month - far longer than traditional products.
Advantage is applied easily by dripping it from a small tube onto the back of the pet's neck. It naturally spreads from there to the rest of the body.
Frontline must be sprayed over the entire pet, but it promises to kill fleas for one to three months and it also kills ticks for a month.
The downside to these new remedies is their cost.
To boost income and encourage proper use, the companies decided to sell them only through veterinarians and only in multiple-dose packages covering several months.
Purchase of an insecticide and a growth regulator, combined with the vet's fee can bring the up-front cost to $75 or more.
Nonetheless, the vets say they are still cheaper in the long run because they end the cycle of running back to the pet store every week or two.
Ticks pose an additional challenge because many of them spread illnesses to humans like Lyme disease, which can lead to flu- and arthritic-like symptoms and, if unchecked, severe heart problems.
Although adult ticks are easy to see and pluck out before infect your pet, they are much smaller and hard to see in their earlier nymphal stage - but just as dangerous.
Products like Frontline and Preventick - a new tick collar from France's Virbac SA - promise to kill for weeks, but they take up to two days to kill them all. The University of Rhode Island's Mather said that may not be fast enough to prevent infection.
``After 24 hours, the chance that a nymphal tick feeding on an animal is transmitting Lyme disease bacteria increases considerably,'' he said.
Veterinarians suggest pet owners in areas where disease-borne ticks thrive - mostly the East, Midwest and upper West Coast - inspect their outdoor pets and themselves daily during the spring and summer and remove ticks immediately, using tweezers.
Mather said these pet owners may have to use older insecticides like pyrethrins to ensure all ticks are killed rapidly.
LENGTH: Long : 135 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Veterinarian Richard Ford at North Carolina Stateby CNBUniversity in Raleigh sprays Cody with Frontline - the brand name
for the insecticide Fipronil. The new spray controls fleas and ticks
for up to three months. color.