Month of the Flea (Regs part 2)

As a title, it's not bad. (Assumes gravelly movie-trailer voice) 'Prepare yourself for pain. Prepare yourself for horror. Prepare yourself for...' (crashing chords from orchestra to set your teeth on edge) 'Month of the Flea!' But when it comes down to it, it's just a shabby attempt to move people onto more expensive forms of flea control than the scabby old flea collars you can get at the supermarket. These days we're encouraging pet owners to put a drop of unspeakable chemical nastiness directly onto the one-eighth-of-a-square-inch of our cat that she cannot lick. Dogs are easier, I'm told, since they're too busy licking their own nadgers to care what you're putting on them.

We treated our cats with this stuff for a while, and I have to say it was pretty amusing. Anything that makes a cat go 'Oh my God! He's putting something on my skin! I can feel it soaking into me! AAARGH getitoffgetitoffgetitoff!' and then shoot through the catflap hard enough to knock it off its hinges gets my vote, frankly. But then, I'm the man who once laughed himself sick after his cat accidentally sellotaped itself to a balloon. Don't ask, but it was bloody funny.

In the end we stopped using the drops because although the flea control was okay, the tick control was completely useless; being told that 'any feeding ticks you see will drop off within a few days and die' is no comfort when you then have to advise your toddlers not to eat any grey sweetcorn they might see lying around. We went back to the inexpensive collars, which the cats tolerate, and the ticks disappeared. Only I get them now, since they won't stay on the cats.

The point is, I'm waiting for the collars to disappear off the market, regulated out of existence by something called Evidence Based Medicine. On the face of it, evidence-based medicine is a very good idea. 'If you want to claim that something works,' it goes, 'you have to prove it.' Which all sounds terribly sensible to protect us from the quacks. Except that if you add the inevitable '... to the local regulatory authorities' then you begin to see where this drive might take us.

In the case of the flea collars, these have a generic insecticide in them (it's nasty stuff, but I have yet to find anything else that works) and thus can't be patented. Proving that they work, however, would require trials and the gathering of new and exhaustive safety data – two truckloads of printed information, if it were hard copy. That's a hugely expensive process for a product that can't then be patented to protect profits; no-one will do it. And so the collars, which work very well, will go. Over the last decade I've seen a hundred traditional and safe remedies go the same way, in favour of newer products which may work better, but may not. It doesn't matter, since the old ones go anyway.

So - Evidence-Based Medicine is killing older 'remedies'. That's not what it was intended to do (it was only intended to stop firms making claims that patently weren't true about their products) - but hey, what can you do? Them's the rules. More later...