Many of you have probably seen the recent news about Seresto collars and people lobbying for a recall of them. These news stories pop up fairly often, and we as a clinic want to say that we continue to stand behind these products and will continue to recommend and sell them.
The first thing to note is that a lot of the cases that have reported adverse and serious effects to the collars actually had counterfeited collars that were purchased online or at pet stores rather than directly from the veterinary clinic. We order our collars directly from Bayer, the manufacturer, but there's no way to know where the collars purchased from other places originally come from. Below is a link to a video that shows how to identify a genuine Bayer Seresto collar vs a counterfeit.
Here are some other statistics that support our decision to stand behind this product:
Seresto has been approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) after undergoing 80+ studies on safety, toxicity, and efficacy.
Incident reports are reported without regard to the actual causation - this goes back to what we learned in school that correlation is not causation, meaning that just because something happens to your pet that was wearing a Seresto collar DOESN'T mean it was BECAUSE of the collar, it could be an underlying issue that wasn't known about.
33 million collars have been sold in the US, and the number of incident reports (most of which have been about minor or moderate incidents) is a very small percentage of the collars in use - as of last year, the reported rate of adverse events was 0.3% (.003), and 90% of that small number were reported for minor incidents.
All products and medications have some degree of risk, but studies have shown that the risks associated with Seresto are not unreasonable, and the American Veterinary Medical Association does not support the proposed recall.
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