Because of their convenience, oral dosage forms are an emerging trend in companion animal formulations. Ectoparasiticides represent a significant proportion of the treatments administered to pets, and recently oral formulations have been commercialized. They have to demonstrate high palatability to ensure that they are voluntarily accepted by the animal especially because they are repeatedly offered medications. The present study aimed to compare the dog's preference between two commercially available oral ectoparasiticide formulations containing either afoxolaner (Nex-Gard ® , Merial) or fluralaner (Bravecto ® , MSD Animal Health). In two separate experiments, 225 individual dogs (115 and 110 respectively) were offered a choice of afoxolaner or fluralaner chewable tablets. The 225 dogs were given an opportunity to smell both products, and then the products were simultaneously offered to each dog by hand for 4 consecutive days with products offered from alternate hands on each day. Individual consumption and related behaviors were recorded. The same individual offered the products to the dogs throughout each study. The total number of chewable tablets for each formulation was recorded and preference was evaluated as the consumption of a given formulation during more days. A total amount of 797 tablets were consumed by the 225 dogs during the 4 days of the studies. A total of 573 (71.9%) afoxolaner chews and 224 (28.1%) fluralaner chews were consumed voluntarily. The overall consumption ratio was 2.56 to 1 for NexGard™ to Bravecto ® , with significantly (p < 0.0001) more dogs consuming NexGard ® than Bravecto ® on each day. As for dogs demonstrating a preference over the entire test period; 83% of the dogs tested preferred NexGard ® to Bravecto ® , resulting in a preference ratio of 5 to 1 for afox-* Corresponding author.L. Halos et al. 26olaner formulation versus fluralaner formulation. This study demonstrated that when dogs were offered a choice between the two ectoparasiticide products, a significant preference for NexGard ® was observed.

BackgroundEfficacy of FRONTLINE® TRITAK® For Dogs (fipronil/(S)-methoprene/cyphenothrin, Merial, Inc., Duluth, GA) against Ixodes scapularis was evaluated in two separate, but concurrent laboratory studies.MethodsOne day after topical treatment with placebo or active, dogs (n = 24) were infested with 50 unfed adult Ixodes scapularis ticks, with repeat infestations on Days 7, 14, 21 and 28. The number of live ticks was counted at 6 hours post-infestation in the first study (n = 12) and at 24 hours post-infestation in the second study (n = 12).ResultsObserved efficacies in study 1 were 93-99 % at 6 hour assessments on Day 1 through Day 28 and in the second study, 98-100 % at 24 hour assessments, occurring on Day 2 through Day 29.ConclusionsA single dose of FRONTLINE® TRITAK® For Dogs (fipronil/(S)-methoprene/cyphenothrin) (0.67 ml or 1.34 ml) prevented the establishment of a new infestation following treatment, as well as the repeated weekly re-infestations with Ixodes scapularis ticks, for 4 weeks.

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A human vasculature-based algorithm has been proposed for template security. The complete biometric template is binarized and divided into specific number of shares. These shares are overlapped so that all the binary bits are overlapped. This leads to formation of entirely new pattern. The vein biometric information is kept secured in the overlapped shares but in an encrypted way. These overlapped shares are stored as coefficients of the vein curves instead of image for individuals. This exponentially reduces space to store the templates. If anyone steals this secured template then also no useful information regarding the vein biometric can be obtained. The proposed method has been implemented and proved for very small false acceptance and false rejections on standard datasets.