The Center for Biological Diversity filed a legal petition Thursday morning asking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to ban a popular flea and tick collar that has been linked to thousands of incident reports about pet and human harm.
The Seresto collar, developed by Bayer and now sold by Elanco, has faced increased scrutiny, including a Congressional inquiry and class action lawsuits, following a March story by the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting and USA TODAY. The story found more than 75,000 incident reports of harm linked to the collar, including at least 1,698 pet deaths and almost 1,000 people harmed.
More:Popular flea collar linked to almost 1,700 pet deaths. The EPA has issued no warning.
The Center for Biological Diversity, a national nonprofit conservation organization that acts as a watchdog of the EPA as part of its mission to protect endangered species, obtained those documents showing the widespread harm and shared them with the news outlets.
The group’s petition, to which the EPA is required to respond, argues that the agency needs to take action to protect pets and people. Seresto has been the subject of more adverse incident reports than any other product in EPA history, according to EPA documents, yet the agency has not taken any action to inform the public of risks associated with the pesticide-based collar. The petition outlines how the EPA’s registration decisions regarding the pesticides failed to protect pets and humans.
“Every…
