Bad neurological reaction to wormer (plus obligatory kittens pics)

[NCforkittenpics]

My 10 week old kittens had their first worming tablet this morning - Milbemax. By lunchtime, the boy kitten had lost control of his back legs and was falling all over the place.

I rushed him to the vet, who was totally perplexed. He thought initially the kitten must have jumped/fallen and injured his spine, or maybe given himself a concussion. Gave him the tiniest injection of an anti-inflammatory, and said to keep an eye. I asked if it could have been the wormer, and he said he'd never seen a reaction like this in 21 years as a vet.

By the time I got home, the second kitten was showing the same symptoms, albeit less extreme. So I called the vet back, and he double checked the info, and yes - ataxia, confusion, lethargy are listed as "extremely rare" side effects, less than 1 in 10,000. Except my cats are two for two! Officially that would be a 1 in 100,000,000 chance 🤔

Anyway, they seem fine in themselves, they're eating, drinking, peeing, pooing. I just wanted to post here to see if anyone else had ever seen similar symptoms? And I guess I wanted to make a post that someone else could Google in the future.

Also, because that whole story is pretty "outing" I thought I might as well name change and add a few pictures 😉

How traumatic for you! They are totally 😍 😍

No but they are so beautiful! Someone’s got to get the super rare reactions!

Gorgeous kitties 😍

Our kitten had a similar reaction to a flea tablet that was given when she was about 10 weeks old at the vets (she was too little for spot on). It lasted about 2 hours and then she was fine again. Terrified us though! She just curled up on my lap, didn't want to wake up and was really unsteady of her feet.

Glad the gorgeous babies are feeling better xxx

1. They’re utterly gorgeous. Hope all the symptoms have worn off soon.
2. It‘s rather unlikely that they would both get it independently of each other, so surely the thought has to be that either the batch of wormer is somehow contaminated, or they share some genetic condition that predisposes them to a reaction. Or that there was a different contaminant they were both exposed to independently of the worming. I would certainly want to use a different brand of wormer next time, at the very least.

It might be worth contacting whoever you got the kittens from to alert the ownrs of the rest of the litter . (If your kittens are siblings ) in case the reaction/suseptability is something in the family ?

Very beautiful kittens

One of mine freaks out when we put spot on in her so we tried an oral version, the vet had to order it in at great expense…anyway she was fine the first few times but then she developed uneven pupils after having it, the vet thought it was a head injury (we hadn’t seen her hit her head but I can’t rule it out, she’s a nutcase!) but since we went back to spot on she hasn’t had anything like that happen again.
(Of course she still freaks when she sees us coming near her with the pipette and we have the scars to prove it )
I think the tablets were called Comfortis?

Our elderly (15) cat has now had two extreme reactions to a spot on wormer . She gets really
distressed, zooms round the garden, hides upstairs then back downstairs in two minutes and her breathing was really fast. It took about six hours for the symptoms to disappear. She won’t be having the spot on stuff again- back to wrestling with tablets for me!! X

Thank you everyone, we're absolutely smitten already! Both kittens are much brighter this evening, they're up and running about almost like normal

Good point about other litter-mates, I hadn't thought of that, but I've let her know now.

The vet said he was assuming some sort of genetic component, but there's always a chance of contamination, or I guess there's even a small chance the tablets were wrongly labelled as kitten dose when they were in fact adult dose? The emergency vet was different from the one who prescribed, and he double checked and said they were the correct dose for their weight. Anyway, he's notified the manufacturer with the batch number.

My gut feeling is that there won't have been 10,000 people who've read this thread so far (!) so the fact that someone else on here has suspected this same reaction does cast some doubt on that 1 in 10,000 figure.

My two cats (not related to each other) both had a reaction to a worming product. One was just a little unsteady for a few minutes but the other had full blown ataxia that took a couple of hours to go away. When he tried to walk he just fell over - very distressing for him and me. When I googled the product, this was listed as a rare side effect - not convinced it is rare, but vet was surprised when I reported it to them.

They both just have Bravecto for fleas and ticks and no worm treatment now.