Reptile & Amphibian Forums

My vet gave me some Sulfadimethoxine (Albon) 12.5%. This was a year ago and in another state. I cannot remember the dosing.

>127mg/ml) Oral solution

Does this mean 1 ml is equivalent to 127mg dosage?

50mg/kg x3 days, then same dose every 48 hours as required.

How can I convert this to ml or cc?

TIA!
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Jay A. Martin

OK..1cc = 1 ml. So, if you have a strength of 127 mg/ml, that's the same as 127mg/cc. So if you need a dose of 50mg, then you will need approximately .40cc.

CAUTION: I don’t know anything about Albon or what is in the bottle your vet gave you. But if you know for SURE that the solution you have contains 127 mg/ml, then

This means that every milliliter of the solution contains 127 milligrams of the drug.

It sounds as if you were told to administer orally 50 milligrams of Albon per kilogram of patient body weight once per day for 3 consecutive days, and then the same dose once every 48 hours if the infection you are treating is still present.

Then the formula you need is

[dose of drug (mg/kg) multiplied by weight of animal (kg)] divided by concentration of drug (mg/ml) equals the amount of the solution to give your patient orally

So in this case

Let’s say you have a ball python that weighs 1500 grams. Divide that weight by 1000 to get the patient’s weight in kilograms (=1.5 kg)

To determine the weight (dose) of the drug to give to this particular animal, multiply 50 mg times 1.5 kg (=75 mg Albon)

Since there are 127 mg of Albon per ml of your solution, divide 75 by 127 to determine the dose in ml you need to administer (=0.59 ml)

For calculating drug doses we assume that 1 ml is equal to 1cc. So you would need to administer 0.59 cc, or a little over one half cc to a patient weighing 1.5 kg.

Of course, you need to plug in the actual weight of your patient to the formula above to determine the actual amount of solution to administer.

What you are saying is definitely true...I only gave the amount needed to get a 50mg dose. I suppose I misunderstood the question. It looked to me like there was confusion between cc and ml (same thing).

One other thing that you have to think about with oral meds is that you are going to lose some from the snake spitting it back up (unless you deliver it with a stomach tube) and the fact that the tube is going to displace quite a bit of the med. You will lose a lot of the med if you try to administer it without a tube(just the syringe). The further down into the esophagus you can deliver the medicine the better, directly in the stomach is best. One other danger with delivering it directly into the mouth is accidental aspiration of the medicine.

What I do with oral meds is to "preload" the syringe with an amount of water equal to what the tube will hold, then draw up the med behind that, or just add an amount of water equal to what the tube will hold to the meds. A #10 16" French Catheter hold about .7 cc. If I'm using a tube that holds .7cc of water and my dosage calls for .75cc of meds, then I have to compensate for the meds that will be left in the stomach tube. So, generally, in that case, I would use about .95cc of meds instead of .75cc. The other thing that you can do is draw up the med through the tube to the indicated value that you need on the syringe so that the tube and the syringe are full of pure meds, but whatever medicine is left in the tube will be contaminated, and will be wasted. If you dilute by an amount equal to the volume of the tube, you end up losing less medicine in the process.

Excellent information! Thanks. I have Panacur paste that is 25 gram paste 10% (100 mg/g). But I don't have a measuring device for mg. I normally use a cc syringe or ml syringe. My vet prescribed a fixed amount once for a rescued chondro. How do you convert this dosage to cc or ml? It's not the same as with my previous example because I do not know the mg/ml balance. I'm using Safe-Guard, btw.
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Jay A. Martin

Actually you have fenbendazole in a paste with a brand name of Safe-Guard. The same thing is sold as Panacur. Same drug, different brand names. Anyway, fenbendazole comes in different formulations like paste, powder and suspension.

As to your specific question, I don’t know how you would measure out this form of the product for a reptile. Bear in mind, most folks buying a tube of this paste down at the feed and tack store would be dosing an animal the size of a steer or horse, not a snake. One way you might measure out the paste would be to weigh it on a gram scale. Another way with a full tube would be to try to visualize 25 individual slices through the tube; each would weigh one gram; thus each would contain 100 mg of the drug. Then you could try to divide up each “slice” further as needed. Not super accurate. Luckily, fenbendazole has a wide margin of safety, so if you take reasonable care you shouldn’t be endangering your reptile – too much. But, by the way, how were you planning on convincing that snake to swallow a little of that paste? Okay, I’ll quit joking. I’m guessing you were planning on putting the paste on a food item once the snake had started to eat it? But that’s really not the preferred method of administering the drug.

The above issues are why it would be better for you if you had this drug in a liquid suspension form. Then you could measure it out and administer it via a tube like the sulfadimethoxine (Albon) we talked about above. But, please note, (at least from my reading of your question) you are still missing a few pieces of the puzzle. For any drug you want to administer you need to know what constitutes a dose, how often to give that dose and how long to continue the treatment

Different reference suggest different dosages when using fenbendazole to treat nematodes in reptiles, so you might want to consult with your veterinarian. If that IS what you are trying to treat, then you should be safe with 50 mg/kg given once orally, then repeated one or two times at 2 week intervals.

Sorry to be so long winded. And I hope you didn’t think I was talking down to you. I just wanted to be sure we were both on the same page.

Not a veterinarian,
Joan

There are 1,000 mg to a gram and 31.1 gm to an ounce.

If you have 100 mg/gm and you need a dose of, for instance, 50mg, then you need .5 gm. That is .016 oz. You will need some pretty accurate scales to measure this out. If you have access to a reloader's scale, that converts to 7.68 grains.

You will need to recalculate that to get the exact dosage you need. The numbers I gave will give you 50mg or the med. 1oz = 480 grains, 1gm = 15.4 grains.