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Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

Kills ticks but also kills cats

AFAIK there has only been one documented case of it killing a kitten and it drank the liquid form, unknown quantity. Baby animals do not yet have fully formed livers to metabolize the sodium channel blocker. Insects on the other hand do not have a liver. They use body fat to detoxify but it isn't fast enough or volumetric enough to handle the sodium channel blocker in large amounts relative to their size.

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People put dog tick/flea stuff on cats all the time by accident containing it (I've personally seen it twice now), it usually doesn't kill them but it's absolutely horrible to witness, cats will get seizures and treatment is only supportive, either they live or they don't. Both the cases I saw were brought to the vet and the cats were messed up pretty bad for a few days.

I could imagine if a cat was being covered in it often enough and they lick it up their glutathione may be depleted then their liver won't keep up. I will have to dig into the stats iskander provided to see pre-existing condition the cats were at. i.e. elderly, kittens, sickly Skimming over it I am not seeing stats on age or liver health.

#1 on ASPCA's list of common toxicoses in cats: https://www.aspcapro.org/sites/default/files/zl-vetm0606_339...

Study of 286 cat/permethrin cases in London: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1016/j.jfms.2007.05...

Study of 750 cases in Australia: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1016/j.jfms.2009.12...

...we don't track this stuff nearly as well for pets as we do for humans but seems to have pretty robust evidence of toxicity.

Thankyou for that. I had not found the Sage journal when I was looking for this in the past.

Here's a case study of 42: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1016/j.jfms.2009.09.018 And there's certainly many more cases than just those at a "referral hospital in Sydney, Australia."

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