An expanding, lucrative veterinary healthcare market has given more choice to animal lovers seeking out treatments to improve and prolong the lives of their pets but the benefits are laced with hazards, writes Neil Trainis...

The concept of health maintainance is habitually linked to human well-being but an evolving animal health market and the emergence of a plethora of veterinary medicines have shunted pet care further into the limelight.
Veterinary pharmacies, specialising in providing veterinary medicines, over-the-counter products and advice to owners of animals and livestock, have come to the fore in recent times as animal lovers embrace more sophisticated methods to cure pet ailments. Dogs, cats and horses are among the most popular pets in the UK and The Daily Telegraph last year revealed that owners of those animals spend on average £270 a year on vets bills, including pills and treatment. The animal health market is worth an estimated $12 billion worldwide, according to pharmaceutical company EctoPharma.
One of the most popular veterinary medicines on the market is Frontline Spot-On flea, tick and lice treatment, manufactured by Merial and which generated the company £130 million in revenue in 2009. “It's been on the market for five years but it's been strong in pharmacy over the last three-and-a-half years. As a brand it's done very well,” said Steve Stowe, Merial's pharmacy business manager for the south.
Rajiv Shah, business development manager at Sigma, identified Frontline and Drontal, a worming medication for cats and dogs manufactured by Bayer, as the “core products” in animal health. “Everything else should be built around those. Frontline is a bigger seller than Nicorette. It's a very powerful brand and generates a significant proportion (of Sigma's revenue),” he said. “Flea sprays also sell very well. Research has shown that 5% of fleas remain on the animal and 95% spread into the environment.” Shah suggested that after Frontline, the next most popular sellers for Sigma are animal specific diet foods.
The evolution in the UK veterinary market has been startling. Stowe insisted that the sector is “very buoyant, increasing 10 to 11% every year over the past three to four years.” Pharmaceutical companies run veterinary divisions and use human drugs as a template in designing animal drugs. Pioneering new products continue to seep into the animal health market.
Onsior, a pain therapy for cats and dogs, was launched on the European market in September, targeting “osteoarthritis in dogs and acute pain in cats.” Novartis Animal Health, a branch of Novartis UK, developed the drug to expand a limited marketplace for pain management in cats. “A big benefit of Onsior is that the drug travels rapidly through the pet's bloodstream to selectively target the tissues in inflammation and pain. The drug takes affect and exits the blood quickly to reduce potential side effects,” according to Novartis. Pain alleviation is achieved while reducing potential side-effects in the gastrointestinal tract and kidneys.
Late last year Pfizer UK promoted Trocoxil, an anti-inflammatory treatment for dogs with degenerative arthritis. Palladia, a pioneering drug available on the US market designed to treat cancer and mast-cell tumours in dogs, is being trialled by referral centres ahead of its anticipated release in the UK.
A tyrosine kinase inhibitor, Palladia destroys tumour cells by cutting the blood supply to the tumour, although trials conducted by The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the body detailed with regulating the development of new drugs in the US, found that side effects included diarrhea, a decrease or loss of appetite, weight loss, lameness and blood in the stool.
An increasing number of the 12,600 pharmacies in the UK have made the plunge into the animal health market. As competition to exploit the revenue-generating potential within the veterinary pharmaceutical industry intensifies, a greater array of pet cures have presented themselves.
In the wake of the Competition Commission's report seven years ago concluding that veterinary surgeries had an unfair advantage in selling prescription only drugs, the marketplace has swelled from £532 million two years ago to £601 million this year, according to a report in The Times last month.
Although the market for domestic pet medicines has dwindled, with owners' spending on treatments such as annual vaccinations for cats and dogs decreasing in the recession, the sphere of pet care promises to thrive long-term because the amelioration in the quality of medicines has seen animals live longer.
A study carried out by The Institute of Grocery Distribution (IGD) on behalf of The National Office of Animal Health (Noah), the body representing the UK animal medicines industry, highlighted that consumer consciousness of animal medicines has increased markedly in the last two years, sparking the acceleration in demand.
Indeed, 74 per cent of consumers are aware that animals need to be vaccinated to prevent disease, compared with 58 per cent two years ago. As public consciousness has increased, so too has the array of cures.
The cost of undergoing local veterinary treatment, however, has not come cheap. Animal lovers have been tempted away from expensive veterinary surgeries clutching their prescriptions and towards internet retail sites specialising in cheaper animal medicines.
VioVet, an internet retail site created in conjunction with a veterinary practice in Hertfordshire, “supplies pet owners with veterinary medicines at the lowest prices we can achieve.” The company supplies a range of prescription and non-prescription medicines and diets and allows customers to compare its prices with those of other outlets. Indeed, VioVet boasts that it is “substantially cheaper than a typical local vet.”
The group cites cures for pet ailments including allergies, arthritis, cancer, diabetes, asthma, worms and liver, kidney, heart and lung disease, not to mention the ageing process and  behavioural problems.
Medication aimed at tackling arthritis in cats includes Cosequin, which VioVet describes as containing “a unique combination of active ingredients that support the cartilage” for £30.30. Seraquin, meanwhile, is capable of decelerating “the progression of osteoarthritis by providing building blocks to stimulate the joints” of cats and small dogs for  just £11.56. By contrast dogs enduring degenerative arthritis can undergo stem cell treatment at £2,000 per session, with no guarantee of success. It is little wonder consumers have been enticed by online pet medication and food stores.
“The market is growing all the time. Now and then our vet would mention a product that would do really well on the market. They mentioned Slentrol, which is designed to get dogs to reduce their weight,” Luke Cousins, a partner at VioVet, said. ”It is a prescription medicine and quite hard to get. We sell it very occasionally at £13.32 for a 20ml bottle.”
Internet sites like VioVet provide a cheaper service but their exploits continue to erode the income of local veterinary surgeries selling the same products. Cousins rejects the suggestion that competition generated by veterinary internet retail sites such as his one is damaging to veterinary practices.
“On the one hand we are taking vets' business away from them but I don't think it affects them too much, even if they claim differently,” he suggested. There is, though, a flip-side to the healthy competition and wider consumer choices generated by the expansion of the marketplace.
Phil Sketchley, chief executive of Noah, suggested that the proliferation of internet sites selling animal diets and medicines, though largely beneficial, should not camoflauge “a few bad eggs” in the form of sites which fail to provide adequate information and sell potentially dangerous products.
“We're keen to ensure that medicines are sold safely and correctly (online) and that's particularly important for prescription only medicines,” he said. “I'm quite pleased at the way (sites) are operating. If they improve an animal's health, that's their raison d'etre, a bonus. But some websites where you search for a product and simply add to basket can create problems. Those tend to be outside the UK or outside Europe and are difficult to police.”
The Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD), the executive agency responsible for the safe manufacture and use of veterinary medicine in the UK, has flagged up concerns. It intends to create the statutory requirement for all internet sites selling veterinary medicines and diets to be registered with them or face closure and even legal action. Companies buying products from unregistered sites would also be accountable.
“We have concerns of internet trading of medicines. Some have done well, some have not done well. Some websites are run by people not authorised to sell or not complying with the guidelines”, said John FitzGerald, director or operations at VMD.
“We carried out a review of 150 websites and a reasonable number were doing things they shouldn't be. They got back to us and corrected that but others, five or six big websites, caused us concern.”
Of those 150 websites looked at VMD found that half of those were a cause for concern but FitzGerald insisted that part of the battle was persuading legitimate veterinary internet pharmacies and retail sites to report anything suspect.
“We need people in the industry to tell us when things are not being done properly,” he said, before adding that VMD function without any legal powers, at least for now. “We have no legal power over (the internet sites) but we write to them and ask them to comply.”
In striving to attain statutory powers, VMD has started canvassing the opinions of internet sites and that consultation process will this month result in an approach to the new coalition Government on the path towards crystalising as legislation.
Cousins, however, rejected the notion that such a register would provide a panacea for the unscrupulous exploitation of the marketplace. “There's always going to be people who don't follow the law,” he said. “The really dodgy ones aren't going to be affected because they are not following the rules anyway, so forcing more rules on them won't make any difference.”