Rich wrote:
Also, no one around here has the potassium permanganate. The lfs gave me
two options. first is to use white vinager and the other is to use bleach.
any advice on this?


Soaking food in the oxytetracycline should be fine. If your fish will
take a dry prepared food like flakes or pellets, that will absorb more
of the medicine than bloodworms. Also remember as you feed that the
antibiotic will leach back out of the food into the water so try to feed
in a way that the fish eat quickly. (Not hard with most cichlids!)

As for disinfection, I'm surprised you can't find permanganate. Many
"water clarifiers" have it as the main ingredient. Jungle Clear Water
is one. The nice thing about permanganate is you can see when you've
rinsed it all away, and it's not toxic to fish at low (pale to moderate
purple) concentrations.

Bleach is also a fantastic disinfectant but if you don't get it all
rinsed away, it will kill your fish. I usually use a garden hose to
rinse fishtank stuff I've bleached with many gallons of water, and then
treat the tank with dechlorinator. You can also use a chlorine test kit
if LFS has one to be sure the tank is safe.

I've never heard of disinfecting with vinegar and I used to disinfect a
lot of stuff in biology labs. It would be easier to clean out of your
tank since it's nontoxic to fish, but look around the web to see whether
you can find anyone knowledgable who has successfully killed columnaris
with vinegar first.

Good luck - aggressive columnaris is no fun.

--
__ Elaine T __
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