Hi, I live in Australia and my baby has HITH. I've been sourcing treatments on the net, but there must be some kind of restriction on what can come into the country cause i can't seem to find anyone who will send meds here. Does anyone know of anything other than Salt that i can give my baby? I'm concerned for the little fella cause the HITH is forming just above his eye and i'm sure his eye will fall out if something isn't done soon!! I've done 2 water changes this week and added salt to the water, but it doesn't seem to be working. He is in the tank with another oscar and the tank is 3 foot. Hubby is trying to take his pic so i can post it for all to see.

Thanks in advance for your help

Nik

Hi there, I think you e-mailed me yesterday. We will do our best to help you. There are quite a few guys from Australia on the board so I'm sure that they will do their utmost to advise you on where you can get medications from. There must be something available in Australia. However, like I said in the e-mail, I think you would be very advised to pay a visit to a vet. Some of these off-the-shelf medications don't always work, intervention by that is often necessary, especially as the condition is quite bad

I was about to ask a bunch of questions but reading the condition is quite bad, the vet sounds like the best idea, provided they know about fish.

Else some things you can do, if not covered already, are
- to raise the temp a bit while keeping the tank well aerated,
- to keep doing water changes, maybe even daily, while replacing the aquarium salt
- to test the water (what are the readings for ammonia, nitrite, nitrate if you did already?)
- to feed them a good, protein enriched diet (high quality pellets, frozen food, earthworms, crickets, insects, whatever)
- if using feeder fish, to stop that for now
- to take the carbon out of the filter if using any
- to add a vitamin supplement to the food, provided hasn't gone off food already - if you can't get any for fish, some for kids is possible as well, but without sugar

Can't think of more right now. There are lots of theories on what causes HITH and probably different possibilities as well such as bad water conditions, malnutrition, internal parasites (Hexamita or others).
If you manage to get meds from a shop, don't let them you into something "that works for everything", those do more harm than good and will weaken the fish even more and neither work with hexamita in most cases, should it be that. Meds are toxines after all.

Good luck and keep us posted!

HITH is difficult to get rid of. You can try the meds but the jury is out of whether they work. The most common cause is poor water quality. Have you tested your nitrates?

The best thing to do to try to cure HITH is keep the water as good as possible. Change water as often as you can (even daily as metoo says). You need to keep your nitrate below 20, the lower the better. However it takes a long time to cure HITH. Good luck

[img] [file] Hi just make sure that the water is always clean so that the hit will not be infected. and puing salt will not help cause oscar's are fresh water fish not salt water. but i think that there is a medicine that can be put in the water to cure the hits of the fish.try to ask the shop where you buy your fish or try looking in to the books on how to keep oscar fish.
Hope that this things would help you bye