This section of parasitipedia.net offers articles> on general safety aspects of veterinary antiparasitics and specific safety summaries of those individual active ingredients that are more used in antiparasitics for dogs, cats, horses, livestock (cattle, sheep, goats, swine) and poultry.

The general safety aspects apply to all veterinary antiparasitics and explain the major safety concepts (e.g. tolerance, acute and chronic toxicity, safety margins, etc).

• Safety for domestic animals
• Safety for humans
• Safety for the environment
• Hazard classification of pesticides

The safety summaries of single active ingredients include information on acute toxicity, tolerance, safety margins, poisoning symptoms, antidotes, adverse drug reactions, side-effects, etc.

They focus on the veterinary use of such active ingredients, not on possible human use (e.g. incidental poisoning of humans with such products), although sometimes their toxicological behavior can be quite similar in animals and humans.

You can select one in the corresponding menu or from the table below. Such safety summaries do not replace the safety instruction printed in the label of each veterinary drug. And they must not be confused with the Material and Safety Datasheets (MSDS) officially issued by manufacturers for active ingredients and many other chemicals. MSDSs target safety during manufacturing, transport, storage and handling of such materials. The safety summaries offered in this site are a complement to the information on product labels and MSDS.

The information in the safety summaries has been extracted from numerous reliable sources, mainly (but not exclusively) from the databases of the Parasitology Institute at the University of Zürich (CliniPharm and CliniTox), the US National Pesticide Information Center, the European Medicines Agency, the EXTOXNET website (a common initiative of several US universities) and the INCHEM website (Chemical Safety Information from Intergovernmental Organizations).

The amount and the quality of safety data on parasiticidal active ingredients varies a lot. As a general rule, for old and vastly used active ingredients information is quite abundant, but sometimes confusing. The reason is that many studies have been done using different qualities of active ingredients, or different scientific protocols, etc. For very modern active ingredients reliable information is usually available in governmental sites of registration authorities (e.g. FDA, USDA, EMEA, APVMA, etc.) but it is usually rather scarce.

The toxicity of pure active ingredients must not be confused with the toxicity of finished products (in this case parasiticidal drugs or pesticides). Finished products contain one or more active ingredients, but also other ingredients that can be relevant from the safety point of view.

LEGEND. (1) L=Livestock; P=Pets; E= Horses (C=Crop Protection; Hy=Domestic and Public Hygiene; H=Human; ) • (2) LD50: rat acute oral in mg/kg: the lower, the more toxic.

LEGEND. (1) L=Livestock; P=Pets; E= Horses (C=Crop Protection; Hy=Domestic and Public Hygiene; H=Human; ) • (2) LD50: rat acute oral in mg/kg: the lower, the more toxic.