Reptile & Amphibian Forums

can the injectable be administed orally? i ask because its suspended in n-butyl alcohol,potassium hydroxide & water. i have the 2.27 injectable dosage and would prefer oral to im vet says eitherway,doesnt matter. im curious to others experience seems the alcohol&hydroxide would be bad but i guess its in very minute amounts,,,,,,,thomas

In a debilitated animal, I would not give an injectable enrofloxacin orally as the preservatives that you mentioned could be potentially irritating.

But, I have given injectable enro. orally before (under direction of my vet) when we did not have a suitable dilution available. This patient was not very sick, though.

There is a fantastic product that can be used to dilute drugs like enro., it's the same that's used for human medicine (the chalky, white stuff that children's antibiotics often come in fruity flavours). I really cannot remember the name of the product at the moment, but I believe plenty of exotics clinics use this to dilute their drugs so that their patients with tiny body weights (like small birds, mammals and herps) can actually be given measurable doses.

By the way, "2.27" is not a dosage, but nothing more than a number. You need to include a unit, like g/mL or ug/mL for the value to be a dosage

If you don't mind me asking, what is the issue with the patient?

Christina
www.herptiles.net

I kinda put my foot in my mouth, there. g/mL or ug/mL are concentrations, not dosages. A dosage is the amount of drug you are giving according to the weight of the patient, eg: g/kg or mg/kg. A dose is the actual amount given.

Silly me.

Christina

Christina is correct in that the injectable given orally, especially to a small animal, will be irritating. It is stabilized in a 3% butanol solution at a pH of 11. That is a fairly strong base solution and could be hard on the interior of a small animals mouth, not mention the butanol. The 2.27 figure is the percent of enrofloxacin in the solution. It is equivalent to 22.7 mg/ml. You can figure the correct dosage of your solution in ml’s from this figure based on the recommended dose in mg per kg of body weight. Good luck.

Kelly

could i dilute it with just water for po?
the history,,,
entamoeba invadens outbreak in collection of colubrids under control now with metranidazole(flagyl) regiments but a few have developed a secondary infection vet says baytril regiments every 48hrs for 5 days for those individuals & gave me the 22.7 injectable with dosage chart, its just i prefer po to im whenever possible esp. for small colubrids. its a very small dosage(100 to 300 gram snakes).05ml to 100grams that could easily be administered via feeding tube something im very familiar with after the flagyl regiments, i just wanna make sure it gets in their system in the sufficient amounts needed and ive heard the injectable will cause necrosis sometimes ?????
,,,,,,,,thomas

You can definetly use just tap water to dilute for oral dosing (dechlorinated would be better, despite some keepers' claims that our drinking water chlorine has a negligable effect on small animals like herps), but I would only dilute just prior to using. The impurities in tap water could potentially degrade the enrofloxacin- I don't know for certain if it would, but it's possible, so I wouldn't take the chance.

If you were diluting for parenteral administration, sterile water would be necessary.

Yes, the injectable can cause local tissue necrosis if very concentrated and repeated numerous times. I do not know what the threshold for tissue damage is, I've used injectable enrofloxacin plenty of times and have not yet seen this occur myself.

For what it's worth, baytril po is just bad tasting... it still does the job, without causing any problems. In snakes, why not inject it SC into a small prey item? While drug studies havn't really been done on this, it shouldn't cause a problem with effectiveness, and I have done it in my own animals.

Ian

Ha! Of course... This is done with crickets and insectivorous herps... Why not rodent prey and snakes?

Christina