Incorrect route of drug administration

Incorrect route of drug administration Reaction Insights

The FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine database currently lists 1,215 adverse event reports that reference Incorrect route of drug administration as a reaction term, including 74 reports with a death outcome — a 610.0% case-fatality figure calculated across only those events where this reaction was coded. The reaction is indexed in the openFDA system under VeDDRA code 99837, the standardized veterinary dictionary used to normalize clinical signs across submitters. Because reports are voluntary and often describe multiple concurrent signs per animal, the volume here reflects reporting intensity rather than true incidence in the broader pet population.

Incorrect route of drug administration appears most frequently in reports for Dog (664 reports), Cat (450 reports), Cattle (33 reports) — with Dog dominating at 664 entries. Within those species, the breeds most often named alongside this reaction are Domestic Shorthair (242), Cat (unknown) (83), Dog (unknown) (65). These distributions are influenced both by underlying breed popularity and by how veterinarians and owners code a given clinical sign, so they should be interpreted as a reporting fingerprint rather than a pure susceptibility ranking.

The drugs most commonly co-reported with Incorrect route of drug administration are Imidacloprid + Moxidectin (192 reports), Polysulfated Glycosaminoglycan (108 reports), Eprinomectin + Esafoxolaner + Praziquantel (84 reports), Selamectin (77 reports), with Imidacloprid + Moxidectin appearing alongside this reaction in 192 submissions. Co-reporting does not establish that any specific product caused the reaction — FDA CVM data captures temporal association only. The value of these aggregates is in flagging which therapeutic classes appear repeatedly alongside a given clinical sign, so owners and veterinarians can ask targeted questions about medications currently in use.