Flea and tick medications are a great way to keep your pet and home free of little dark jumping bugs. A new study out of France suggests that the convenience and prevalence of these drugs might come with a huge environmental cost that we’ve been ignoring.
Scientists studying a class of popular flea and tick treatments called isoxazolines found that traces of these drugs don’t disappear after they do their job. They continue to pass through cats and dogs and end up in their feces, sometimes even after treatment has ended. That poop then becomes a delivery system for chemicals that may be harmful to insects that rely on animal waste to survive.
Maybe these meds are doing too good a job?
Isoxazolines have been around since 2013 and quickly became a vet’s favorite way to treat a case of fleas and ticks. They last a while (up to a year) and are easy to administer. They’re pretty close to perfect, other than the fact that they keep on killing bugs even after they’ve been pooped out.
The researchers monitored 20 cats and dogs treated with four common isoxazoline drugs over three months. All of the medications lingered in the animals’ systems for weeks, and two were still detectable in feces after treatment stopped. When the team modeled how these leftover chemicals might affect poop-feeding insects, the results suggested a real risk of high exposure.
Flea medicines aren’t single-handedly destroying the ecosystem. But we can add them to the ever-growing list of things regulators have to worry about, like those at the European Medicines Agency, which is already calling for a reevaluation of the environmental impact of antiparasitic pet meds.
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