ICK!! chloroquinne phosphate good or bad?

[SharkBait_Mtl]

The marine fish health & feeding handbook (Bob Goemans and Lance Ichinotsubo), it has a wealth of information regarding fish health and feeding. If you do not have this book I highly recommend it.

I do service and maintenance of many aquariums and one of my clients had a really bad ich breakout in his 1200g system. When looking for alternate ways of treating ich (other than copper) I came across a section in the book regarding using chloroquinne phosphate to treat ich.

I tried it on his system and and not only did it kill 99% of the ich within 10 days it also eradicated ALL the cyanobacteria he had in his tank. I just dosed the tank again yesterday to remove the rest of the ich remaining (very few spots left on a couple of fish and of course on his puffer. All the fish looks a lot better within the 10 day treatment and some of the fish that had stopped eating before the treatment are now eating like pigs.

IME I think that chloroquinne will be my 1st course of action to treat ich.

Has anyone else tried this treatment? good/bad results?

 

[Origami2547]

Never tried it. You don't mention it so I have to ask: Was this a reef system or FOWLR?

Where do you get it? What's the dosage and treatment regimen?

 

[SharkBait_Mtl]

Not reef safe, and not safe for inverts.

This tank is FOWLR with no inverts.

 

[SharkBait_Mtl]

Dose was 40mg/Gal I think. Will have to verify that when I get home.

 

[JHemdal]

I typically use it at around 10 ppm - I'm not positive what that works out to be in terms of mg / gal, but I think it is on the order of 36 mg/gal.

In quarantine systems, it has a tendency to kill back your beneficial nitrifiers, and there is usually an ammonia spike. I deal with that using Amquel. In a well-established tank, I don't know if you would see the ammonia spike or not.

A bit of historical perspective - back in the late 1970's many aquarists used a "miracle drug" in their FO tanks called Marex. I learned last year that it actually was just chloroquine HCL.


Jay Hemdal

 

[Airwolf75]

I made some 38mg/ gallon. In my lab we use it for anti-malarial drugs. I can't remember where I got that number though. Should have just used 40, the math would have been easier.

But the Powder Blue Tang I was going to use it on for possible velvet, never developoed the velvet.

I just got that book last week. Have not read it yet.

 

[suta4242]

Jay is it true that chloroquin has no side effects and can be used on even delicate fish such as butterflys? I ask because I find it hard to believe that any treatment has no risk associated with it.

Also isn't the chloroquine inactivated to some extent by light? So how do you know you've still got 10ppm for the course of the treatment?

 

[SharkBait_Mtl]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=15412835#post15412835 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by suta4242
Jay is it true that chloroquin has no side effects and can be used on even delicate fish such as butterflys? I ask because I find it hard to believe that any treatment has no risk associated with it.

Also isn't the chloroquine inactivated to some extent by light? So how do you know you've still got 10ppm for the course of the treatment?

The friend that introduced chloroquine to me used it on a copperband butterfly and it is still alive and eating well. the fish was treated 3-4 months ago. none of his fish are showing negative side effects.

I read in the fish health book that the UV sterilizer MUST be turned off.
" if UV sterilization and/or Ozone are being employed, turn them off as well, since they can denature or even destroy chemical compounds "

Apart from not being reef safe or invert safe I have seen no ill effects to any of the members of the tank i just treated. I just redosed the tank again on wednesday to remove the last few spots (>1% of what was originally in the tank) I will keep this thread posted with results.

The only bad thing that I can say about chloroquine, is that here we are using it to treat fish, while human adult and children are dying of malaria around the world. I hope I just didnt start something here.

A colleague of mine just treated a tank full of goldfish on friday I will observe the tank and let you know.

 

[JHemdal]

suta4242,

Chloroquine is deactivated by UV light..so using it in a system with a UV sterilizer running on it is probably not a good idea. Most home aquariums are not exposed to sunlight, so other than that warning, this isn't a problem. However, would I say that chloroquine is safe for ALL fish? No, I don't have enough of a track record with it to say that for sure. - It is a rather harsh chemical (as I said, it will nuke the beneficial bacteria is some tanks) and I've learned that it will also kill off some metazoans - such as Turbellarians (The Georgia Aquarium staff found this out). This can be a good thing (If that's what you are trying to control) but any strong chemo drug like this also has the potential for deletarious side effects on the main aquarium animals as well...and if it kills off enough of these critters, their decomp can cause the ammonia spike that I warned about.

Jay

p.s. - one other cool thing, if you happen to have a UV spectrophotometer sitting around, you can use it to measure the amount of chloroquine active in a system. My spec is 20+ years old, and can't do that, but some newer ones can.

 

[baobao]

Jay, What is the half life of CP?
Problem with CP is that unless you have thousands of $$$s to spend on UV Spectro., you risk over/under dosing, especially if one needs to do constant water changes, add water etc.

 

[JHemdal]

baobao,

Sorry, I don't know. I do recall that the old Marex drug from the 1970's was dosed monthly, so my guess is that it is pretty stable.
Back in the day, we would just dose it once. If I had to do water changes during the treatment, I would just re-dose the replacement water with the appropriate amount.

Jay

 

[hottuna]

Jay: since we're talking 1970's - remember the old AQUACURE by poly bio marine...??? think it was copper/formalin...and it killed just about every ectoparasite ,ich,velvet,etc ...it was the "cure all" of its day...when I visited one of the wholesalers back in '76 in brooklyn -the owner would just walk down the aisles in his facilty-look at the fish-and just throw a capful of aquacure here and there whenever the tanks inhabitants didnt look good..
those were the days?