Question for Comfortis users

[gritsar]

Assuming you live in an area where fleas are not a year-round problem, do you keep your dog(s) on comfortis for the whole year or take the winter off?
I'm thinking of only giving the puppy his comfortis only until November (which will give him coverage into December) and then resuming it again in March.
His heartworm tablets we'll be giving year-round because I have seen mosquitos in the wintertime here, but never fleas.

 

[Brindlebtch]

I don't see any reason to give flea meds if there aren't any fleas.

 

[mamaKate]

I still use Frontline because when I googled Comfortis there were too many cases of seizures. 4 of my dogs are seniors and I'm not willing to risk it. The whole staff at my vet's office uses it, though. They always recommend flea prevention year around but I agree that no fleas = no insecticide.

 

[gritsar]

Quote:
That's what I'm thinking. We tried the other flea products, but between the pup and the cats we couldn't keep fleas under control. While I hate giving Jax chemicals, the least I can do is give his system a break every winter.

 

[verlaj]

I only give Comfortis when we see we have fleas. We started it when we discovered that Frontline and Advantage and the like were no longer effective. My veterinarian suggested we switch to Sentinel (from Heartgard) because that would prevent fleas that fed on the dogs from reproducing AND give Comfortis to kill adult fleas that were on them. She said after we got things under control, that we could probably stop the Comfortis and only use the Sentinel. This has worked well for us so far, which has been a couple of years, I believe. We only once or twice had to pop in a Comfortis treatment when for some reason we were seeing fleas on one of the dogs. Our dogs generally stay on our property and other dogs only rarely come here bringing fleas in from other places.

 

[Judy]

I also do the heartworm year round but stop the flea prevention in the fall. Have not seen a flea in years.

 

[Cara]

We don't ever use flea medication. I don't know whether it's because of our climate or because we're so isolated, but we have five indoor/outdoor dogs and a cat and have never seen a flea on any of them. We use heartworm preventative but I don't believe there's ever been a case of heartworm even in untreated dogs here. We probably don't have an infected population near enough for the mosquitoes to spread the disease.