Flea Fever

It's that time of year again (depending on where in the world you are) that spring has hit and the fleas are out in full force. Fleas have been blamed for many health problems including the plague, and also carry tapeworms which can be transmitted to your pets and to people. The best way to prevent fleas is to use a monthly flea preventative on all of your pets regardless of whether your animals go outside. If you have very young pets that cannot have monthly preventatives, you can bathe them with Dawn dishsoap- works great! Popular and effective flea preventatives are Frontline, Revolution, and most recently Comfortis. There are many others, but these are the newest, most effective, and safest products out there. Many of the cheap products from Hartz and Bio Spot have been known to cause extreme illness, seizures, and death in cats and smaller dogs. You also have to be careful where you buy your good products. Many stores and internet companies are now selling Frontline and Revolution and claim they are the same as what you get at the vet. Surprise, surprise, they are not. The companies that make and sell the product sell only to licensed veterinarians and have no idea how these other places are getting these products. Are they from rogue veterinarians selling excess stock? Perhaps counterfeit product? Or foreign products that are made by the same counterpart companies but go through testing different from the FDA? Afterall, just because it's good enough for Europe are we sure we trust the safety tests they have done on it (and vice versa)? All of these situations have been discovered at one time or another.