sentinel will not solve your problem...it has a heartworm preventative (interceptor) which is excellent for heartworms, hookworms, roundworms and whipworms but the flea portion will not kill one flea..it is a flea growth regulator and will only sterilize fleas which will survive and bite your dog ...just wont make new fleas and that portion of the drug only works if you remember to give the tablet with food...the heartworm portion works with or w/o food.......the hottest product on the market right now is comfortis by eli lily.....i was the first vet to use it and i dont think i have had one failure...it is a tablet which must be given with food for it to work the full month....it requires that the flea feed(bite the dog) but kills the flea within 4 hours of the first bite for the first two wks....then, like everything else, it begins to be less fatal but is still rated as high as frontline on day 28...it is 98%fatal to fleas but it is not killing the fleas real fast by day 28....many vets do not carry it as it is new and another flea product really bombed last yr and i think many vets are afraid to try something else new....we still sell more frontline than anything else...but in two yrs comfortis has become the #2 vet flea product and in the gulf-coast states (florida/alabama etc) it is already #1....i always say the vets are smarter than us northern vets down there when it comes to fleas because they have to be...i used to call a vet friend in florida yearly to find out what they were doing down there for fleas...now i have a really good vet friend who has fished with me on my boat and he literally does almost all the flea research in the usa...he is at the kansas vet school and likes comfortis very much...if the infestation is bad, i will generally recommend the second comfortis (remember...with a meal) in three weeks...safety has been very good for my cases...two dogs vomited one time...they didnt keep vomiting...just once...of course if they vomit up the tablet...i wont work...it has to be down for two hours and then it works....not approved in cats....if you have multiple furry pets, all have to be on something...you cant just treat one pet even tho that pet may have the most severe skin irritations...all pets must be treated....if you have any other pets let me know and i will recommend something for them....steve...flea sprays, collars, dips are all prehistoric.....nobody bombs the home, treats the yard etc unless the fleas are so bad that they are eating the owners.....sometimes the yard can become badly infested at this time of year from outside critters...the ave opossum in the fall has approx 100 fleas that are the same species that infests almost all dogs and cats (ctenocephalides felis...yep the cat flea!)...those 100 fleas make between 3000 and 6000 eggs per day!....flea eggs are white and we call this opossum a salt shaker!....the black thingies that you find on you pet are not eggs..they are flea poop...and a flea eats 3-6x a day....they eat way more than they need because they are biological poop factories...they produce a very blood rich feces which are those black squiggles and these fall off your pet wherever flea eggs fall off....the flea egg hatches to a small larva and guess what it lives on?....yep the flea poop....next it pupates and forms a cocoon around itself and it can survive for a very long time in this pupal stage..up to a year, but when the humidity is high and it is warm, it will hatch out of this cocoon much sooner...like 7-10 days , and you will see it as a small black flea...if the pet has small black fleas and you have applied a flea product such as frontline, or advantage, this does not mean the flea product is not working....every such product requires that the fleas first get on the pet before it will kill the flea...some products work much better than others...the permethrin products such as hartz, biospot etc essentially dont work because after the first three days they take up to a wk to kill the fleas and fleas begin to multiply on day two...so the math does not add up....they kill one flea 5-7 days after that one flea jumps on and it makes 30-60 eggs a day for 5-6 days before dying....we vets sold permethrin topicals back in 1988...i bought 5-6 thousand dollars worth of them back then and sent it all back the next month....advantage was the first really effective antiflea product made in 1996...it did not kill flea eggs nor ticks(thats advantix)...but for over a week it would kill most fleas even before they bit the pet and it was safe on dogs and cats..up til then, no product was very safe on cats....then came frontline in 1998 i think and in many ways it was superior as it killed ticks and fleas, was much greater waterproof and killed flea eggs...it did not kill fleas quite as fast as advantage but it was 98% fatal at day 28 where advantage was 80% fatal at day 20.....and advantix is less fatal to fleas than advantage in some studies...hope this helps...understand the enemy and use products tailor made to get the best chance of success..steve
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10-19-2009, 06:58 PM
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