"Dances With Ferrets" wrote in message
om...
First of all, with all due respect... I would not have used Mardel
Products (Maracyn, Maroxy, etc.) to treat ANYTHING!!! After having
worked in the aquarium trade for the better part of a decade now, and
at one point being forced to use Mardel medications on fish (and I
followed the package instructions to the letter)... My perception is
that Mardel medications have a ridiculously bloated price, are often
ineffective, or if they do have some effect, it is usually to cloud
your water and kill off most of your beneficial bacteria. In the
remote chance that they DO treat any diseases, it usually takes 3-5
times longer than many cheaper, safer, lower-dosage medications on the
market. If you need a recommendation on a cheap, effective
medication, instead use Pimafix (by Aquarium Pharmaceuticals)... it
is safe for fresh or sal****er, safe for inverts, and works VERY
quickly at clearing up most bacterial and fungal issues in fish. On
top of that it is plant-derived, not a synthetically-produced
antibiotic. Just remember that as with any medication, read the
instructions and follow them closely. I used this same product as a
last resort on a tank full of seemingly-doomed Discus that had just
about every known malady: no appetite, fin rot, cloudy bacterial
slime-coating, and were gasping at the surface of the water. Within
48 hours, most of their symptoms had cleared, they were eating
heartily, and were visibly gaining healthy body mass again.

Good luck to you.

Personally I don't really think that it's fair to dis a particular
manufacturer. For example, Maracyn is basically Erythromycin. It's not
significantly different from the Erythromycin which Aquarium
Pharmaceuticals puts in blister packs as E.M. tablets, or the
Erythromycin you get prescribed from your family doctor. These companies
don't have multi-million dollar budgets to develop new antibodies. They
use what is available on the market. After they acquire the right to
re-sell the product, they can then tweak it, by adding extra stuff. In
the case of Maracyn, they say that theirs is more water soluble,
otherwise, it's the same stuff. I can't comment on the pricing, as that
probably varies considerably by country. In Canada, iirc, they are
around 88 cents a tablet and EM is about 63 cents a tablet.

Maroxy is an oddball which they list as a 'stabilized oxygen-chlorine
compound' *whatever that means*. I've usually been using Triple Sulpha
(Aquarium Pharmaceuticals) for fungal diseases. Mardel's equivalent is
Trisufla (never tried it).

If you want to talk about difficult to verify medications, then MelaFix
and PimaFix are at the top of the list. I don't consider either of them
to be in the class of medications, (more like preventatives or very mild
medications). Melafix certainly has a role to play for various symptoms,
especially with very small fish which get blown away by antibiotics, and
where the symptoms are not too severe. PimaFix I've only used once and
it didn't yield any results. Scanning the documentation, I have a hard
time figuring out what they claim it does (indeed if they even claim
anything), and my rep was of no help either. I'll reserve my opinion on
PimaFix until I've experimented with it more. I'm happy you found an
application where it worked so well. We can always use more tools for
our fish hospitals.
--
www.NetMax.tk