The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not properly reviewed the safety of a popular flea and tick collar that has been linked to more than 3,000 pet deaths, according to the agency’s top watchdog.
The EPA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), an independent office in the agency tasked with holding the agency accountable, published a report on Feb. 29 calling on the EPA to make a proper, science-based decision on the Seresto product and improve its processes for making safety determinations for pet products.
The report found that the agency has not conducted or published animal risk assessments as it promised to do, and continues to rely on an inadequate 1998 companion animal safety study.
Seresto pet collars work by releasing two active ingredients, the pesticides flumethrin and imidacloprid. The OIG found that the EPA has failed to properly review those active ingredients, including in a new analysis last year.
At a congressional hearing in June 2022, pet owner Faye Hemsley of Pennsylvania reported that her dog, Tigger, began to suffer from neurological issues, including his head drooping and a loss of energy, before dying five days after she first put the Seresto collar on him.
Thomas Maiorino of New Jersey also testified at the hearing that his family’s dog, Rooney, suffered neurological issues and eventually a seizure, after wearing Seresto. They eventually decided to put the dog down.
Many other pet owners reported neurological issues in their animals, including seizures as well as pet deaths.
The collars have been the subject of more than 105,354 incident reports, including 3,000 pet deaths, more than any other EPA-regulated product in history, according to the EPA’s incident database.
From 2012 through 2022, the EPA received more than 100,000 incident reports related to the collars, including more than 2,500 pet death reports and nearly 900 reports of human pesticide incidents related to the Seresto pet collars.
“The EPA’s response to reported pesticide incidents involving Seresto pet collars has not provided assurance that the collars can still be used without posing unreasonable adverse effects to the environment, including to pets,” the OIG report states.
The collar has been under sharp scrutiny in recent years after USA Today and Investigate Midwest published an investigation spotlighting the high number of incident reports about Seresto.
The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which is now the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy, launched an investigation and subsequently determined that the EPA knew for years that Seresto was linked to a high number of pet deaths but took no action and recommending that the EPA take it off the market.
Hellbound and Down 