Drug turns human blood into poison for mosquitoes.
A study in Science Translational Medicine found when patients take the drug nitisinone, their blood becomes deadly to mosquitoes.
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This is how topical tick treatments for pets work, no?
You mean oral, right? Oral pills against fleas and ticks poison the parasites through the blood they consume.
I was actually thinking of things like Frontline that you put on their skin. The way it was explained to me is it gets absorbed and essentially makes their blood poisonous to many parasites. I know there are oral versions of these medications too but I have no experience with them
I didn't know the topical ones acted that way. I thought they were more like a repellent. The oral ones, in my experience, are infallible. Give a pill to a flea infested cat and in thirty minutes by the clock you'll start seeing the fleas jump out like they're having a seizure. The cat will scratch for some twenty minutes or so. And that's it. The tricky part is getting the cat to take the pill.
I've had the same experience with the topical stuff. In-laws had never tried it, used it on one of their dogs, and ticks were just crawling off and dying within minutes. Was really gross but fascinating at the same time. Crazy that they thought for years all they could do was wash their dogs and pick ticks off.
In my family, Frontline was a regular purchase for our cats.
Oof that topical stuff is pretty scary, there was a study a few years ago that showed if you applied it to a dog and the dog went swimming before it had been absorbed then it nuked all the small living things in the water and covered a huge area.
Well that's scary... But I have also always heard you're not supposed to bathe your dogs for a few days after application. Guess that's one reason why but I imagine anything they rub themselves on might be a problem
Yeah
