Medical Ethics, a commercial research and development company focused on pain mitigation in wounds for humans and animals, has announced that its wholly owned subsidiary, Animal Ethics, has successfully received approval from the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) to extend the use of tri-solfen in Australia to include pain relief for beef and dairy calves.
Anthony Struss, President of AgForce Cattle Board, Councillor of the Cattle Council Australia and Member of the Queensland Animal Welfare Advisory Board, commented: “We have seen widespread use of tri-solfen across the beef cattle industry since the initial registration of the product in cattle in 2014 and we welcome this extended use. Farmers are increasingly seeking a way to improve welfare standards and tri-solfen provides a safe and effective way to reduce pain and improve wound healing more broadly across livestock.”
Tri-solfen is an innovative spray and stay topical local anaesthetic and antiseptic gel that is designed to adhere to wounds to provide rapid onset numbing with prolonged analgesia effects. It also contains active ingredients designed to minimise bleeding, protect against infection, coat the wound and promote healing.
Kathryn Davis, Program Leader, Animal Health & Fertility at Dairy Australia, said: "This is great news for dairy calf welfare. It is now easy for farmers to provide cheap and effective pain relief on site for calves following husbandry procedures."
Tri-solfen was approved in lambs in 2004, becoming the first topical local anaesthetic pain relief product specifically developed and approved for on-farm use to address husbandry-related pain in infant livestock.
Since then, the product has been approved for use in beef calves and has been widely adopted by Australian farmers in what has become a revolution in farm animal welfare, with more than 8 million lambs and 1 m calves treated with the pain relief product each year.
With more than 1 billion livestock animals globally undergoing highly invasive painful husbandry procedures annually and a critical shortage of products available for on-farm pain alleviation, Animal Ethics is continuing its drive to deliver solutions by pursuing extensions of use for different species, for an increasing range of wound applications, as well as expanding to international markets.
The process for securing a European registration for tri-solfen through the group’s partner, Dechra Veterinary Products, an international specialist veterinary pharmaceutical company, began last month with a dossier being submitted to the European Medicines Agency for painful husbandry procedures in piglets and dairy calves to be treated with the proven technology.
Tri-solfen is already registered in Australia separately for pain alleviation in sheep and cattle husbandry procedures, where it is marketed and distributed by Bayer Animal Health, a global leader in animal health. To date, tri-solfen has been used to successfully treat more than 80 million animals undergoing routine surgeries in the Australian livestock industries.