Sick Of It
- Thread starter Tolak
- Start date
LauraFrog
Fish Gatherer
There are also some difficulties in Australia. You can get sulfa drugs, tetracycline, and occasionally oxytet or chloramphenicol turns up. I have seen streptomycin once but the price was outrageous. Parasite medications are also a bother because it's hard to find internal parasite meds, the vast majority treat external parasites so there's a lot of dose guessing and finger crossing involved to de-parasite anything. Melafix, bettafix and pimafix are always available along with the standard antifungals, acriflavine, methylene blue, malachite green etc.
The real problem is that nobody knows what these do or how to use them and they are expensive, so most of the time, when Joe Blo's fish get sick, he dumps half a container of whitespot med in the water and when it doesn't work, shrugs his shoulders and sells the tank or replaces the fish. So the medications you can get are usually way, way out of date.
If you want the sophisticated stuff though... basically you have to be a doctor, dentist, vet or nurse, work with one, live with one or suck right up to one. There are backdoor ways of course, but it's a real pain sneaking around the place with bottles of potassium permanganate, copper sulfate and other random chemicals that are sometimes substitutes for decent drugs.
The real problem is that nobody knows what these do or how to use them and they are expensive, so most of the time, when Joe Blo's fish get sick, he dumps half a container of whitespot med in the water and when it doesn't work, shrugs his shoulders and sells the tank or replaces the fish. So the medications you can get are usually way, way out of date.
If you want the sophisticated stuff though... basically you have to be a doctor, dentist, vet or nurse, work with one, live with one or suck right up to one. There are backdoor ways of course, but it's a real pain sneaking around the place with bottles of potassium permanganate, copper sulfate and other random chemicals that are sometimes substitutes for decent drugs.
Miss Wiggle
Practically perfect in every way
as you can see I've said this before.
my vet wasn't available to offer much advice and was talking all sorts of nonsense of 'old fishkeeping' advice like old balanced water, using salt to cure everything and so on. However I'd already diagnosed the problem myself with the help of people on this forum and identified the medication that I needed, I had a fish health book which confirmed what I'd found out myself and when I showed this to the vet along with a picture of the fish showing the symptoms he was happy to prescribe for me.
as above i do use this vet regularly for my two cats anyway.
snapefish
Fish Fanatic
I agree entirely, its very frustrating knowing that effective treatment is available but unobtainable.
Some US ebay sellers ship internationally and I've considered trying to get stuff sent over but don't really want to risk it.
Mark
Some US ebay sellers ship internationally and I've considered trying to get stuff sent over but don't really want to risk it.
Mark
LauraFrog
Fish Gatherer
Bingo - breakthrough for Australians.
www.theaquariumshop.com.au
You can buy anything here pretty much and the prices are very good. Melafix, pimafix, bettafix, protozin, myxazin, tetracycline, trichlorfon, praziquantel...
www.theaquariumshop.com.au
You can buy anything here pretty much and the prices are very good. Melafix, pimafix, bettafix, protozin, myxazin, tetracycline, trichlorfon, praziquantel...
Miss Wiggle
Practically perfect in every way
yay, know you've had hideous problems getting meds and stuff in the past Laura, great news that you've found somewhere now.
petertr
Fish Addict
In fairness, there's a very good reason why antibiotics should be very difficult to get hold of.
They shouldn't be sold over the counter, like they are in America.
They shouldn't be sold over the counter, like they are in America.
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