This fall when Clifford Suntjens brings his cattle in from pasture and fills his Sun Ranches feedlot he won’t be reaching for the bottle of Cydectin.
The Coronation, Alta. rancher used Cydectin, a new endectocide, to kill lice last fall on his cattle and had to retreat a few months later when he noticed the cattle were losing hair.
“We weren’t satisfied with the product,” said Suntjens, who has about 2,500 head of cattle on the central Alberta ranch. “We will use it again but not until the company gets things sorted out. We were happy with the company but the product has problems.”
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It’s the kind of nightmare comment Ayerst, the company that launched the lice control product last fall, doesn’t want to hear.
Richard Donnelly, director of marketing with Ayerst Veterinary Laboratories of Ontario, said the company stands by the product.
Cydectin was released to compete against the popular Ivomec, manufactured by Merck Agvet, now Merial Canada Inc.
“We expected 100 percent in 100 percent of the animals because of the data we have and the strong package we have, but it just doesn’t happen that way,” said Donnelly.
If a producer gives one animal too small a dose or misses one animal during anti-lice treatments, the whole herd can be reinfected, he said.
“For Merck to say their product is 100 percent all the time is irresponsible … there will be situations where they may not perfectly control lice in herds.”
Read the directions
But veterinarians with Merck say any problems with their product can be tracked to producers who didn’t properly follow directions.
“The key to the success of the product is applying it properly,” said Michele Doucet, with the technical services division of Merial in Kirkland, Que.
In Canada, controlling lice is a multimillion dollar industry. Cattle producers spend $30-$40 million a year on it.
With that kind of money at stake, the public wrangling between the two companies over the effectiveness of Cydectin has gone beyond concern for producers: it has become a heated battle for market share.
When Ayerst jumped into the lice market last fall, it took a bite out of the endectocide market which Merck controlled until then, said Donnelly.
Both sides quote a study by veterinarian Lydden Polley, of the Department of Veterinary Microbiology at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in Saskatoon.
Polley was hired by Merck Agvet, before the debate began, to test the effectiveness of Ivomec and Cydectin and a non-treated control group.
In the blind study, 18 head of cattle with roughly the same number of lice were divided into three groups for testing.
The staff counted lice each week for eight weeks by parting the hair 30 times and counting the lice in an area 20 centimetres long.
With the Ivomec group, they found no lice after the seventh day. With Cydectin they found some lice on every count.
Polley said the research is similar to Australian research with almost identical results.
But those results differ from a Belgian study that showed no lice after the Cydectin treatment, although it involved fewer hair parting counts.
“It’s very difficult to know the significance of that,” said Polley because not enough is known about lice and how they reproduce.
Double the amount
A Texas study introduced 100 biting lice to cattle to see how the lice would multiply. At the end of the six to eight week study they had multiplied to 200.
Polley doesn’t know if the few lice remaining on the animals treated with Cydectin, compared to the 600 in the non-treated group in his study, would multiply rapidly enough to cause a reinfection in cattle herds.
Polley cautioned producers from reading too much into the effectiveness of Cydectin from the results of his study.
“It’s one trial with one group of animals. The significance of it is difficult to know. It has been on the market for one winter. After two winters we may have a better idea.”
Donnelly said his company has learned from the problems last fall. It has increased the number of staff to look into complaints and instituted a lice-free satisfaction program. If producers have to treat a second time, the company will supply free product and pay 75 cents a head for their trouble.
“If we thought we had some widespread problems with the product we wouldn’t be doing that,” said Donnelly.
