Certifect, Risks, and Saving Money on Dosages

Recently, we decided to try applying a new flea and tick control product on Zeus and Honey. It's called Certifect. It's more powerful than Frontline because it contains an added ingredient - amitraz. However reviewers warn that it is a dangerous product and causes adverse reactions and even death in dogs.


We decided to give this product the benefit of the doubt because none of the products - Frontline, Advantix, etc - we have tried has ever worked on Zeus and Honey and they seem to be getting more and more ticks everyday despite the consistent use of anti-tick sprays and shampoos consisting permethrins and resmethrins.

For the first few days, Daddy claims they looked drowsy. But ticks did start dropping off. Big ones. Small ones. We kept finding dead ticks on the floor. It's been the fourth day so far, and the dogs are still scratching themselves every now and then. But upon inspection, we couldn't find any ticks!

Is the product effective? It's supposed to protect them for a month, but it's only been a few days so far, so we shall wait and see. We highly doubt the protection will last beyond 2 weeks, especially when we bathe them every week.

We bought Certifect for 20-40kg dogs (the purple one). This was because since it's so expensive (about $50 from Singpet), we thought we would buy one for bigger sized dogs, and split the dosage amongst 2 dogs.

It's something you can actually measure out with a syringe, and our friend does this with Frontline based on instructions she read from the Internet. You can also find an article on how to safely proportion dosages here.

To quote the article, "By default, Merial categorizes dogs into four broad categories: 0-22 lbs, 23-44 lbs, 45-88 lbs, and 89-132 lbs. This corresponds to vial sizes of 0.67 ml, 1.34 ml, 2.68 ml, and 4.02 ml."

So if you can do your math, every larger corresponding size begets a double dosage. So it doesn't make sense to buy 2 small dosages.

So if you want to save some money, you know what to do. 

*Update* 
The ticks are back. Certifect only lasted for a week. Bummer.