From FIP Diagnosis to Treatment: One Cat's Journey and What You Need to Know
Join us as we delve into the world of Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP), exploring cutting-edge treatment options and breakthroughs that offer hope to cat owners. Learn from veterinary experts and hear firsthand accounts of successful treatment journeys, including the inspiring story of Moaning Myrtle's battle against FIP.
What You’ll Learn:
Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP) is a fatal disease affecting cats, with limited treatment options.
Clinical trials at veterinary teaching hospitals offer hope for FIP treatment
Coverage of costs, including medication, exams, and blood work, in clinical trials
Concerns over potential transmission risks and increased FIP prevalence
Balance between risks and benefits in using experimental drugs for FIP
Importance of timely diagnosis and enrollment in clinical trials
Eligibility criteria and follow-up requirements for participation in trials
Future episodes to feature interviews with Moaning Myrtle's owner and the study's lead researcher
Ideas Worth Sharing:
"Studies at veterinary teaching hospitals are evaluating the effects of drugs like Remdesivir and Molnupiravir on cats with FIP, covering aspects like side effects, timing of administration, and combination therapies." - Dr. Tyler Sugerman-McGiffin
"The increase in FIP cases in Cyprus suggests a potential for direct transmission of the disease between cats, sparking concerns about its future prevalence and the need for effective treatments." - Dr. Tyler Sugerman-McGiffin
Resources From This Episode:
Colorado State University FIP Clinical Trial
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Dr. Sugerman: [00:00:00] Hi everybody, welcome back. I just wanted to start this episode out really quickly with a thank you. There was a review put out by Alchemy Zen and I just want to say thank you so much for doing that. We really appreciate that. You know I do read the reviews and look through those.
Alchemy Zen had mentioned about my son and doing the fun Kidsplanation podcasts, and we really do enjoy being able to do that together. It's always fun because I just never a hundred percent know what he's going to ask me. I very much put on the spot when we talk about those things.
So again, thank you so much for doing that, and I really appreciate anybody else who puts out a review for us as well. So thank you. So for today, this episode is actually going to be dedicated to my friend, Moaning Myrtle and her mom. So Moaning Myrtle is a roughly one year old female cat who is super cute, like really cute markings, very petite.
I did put a picture of her on YouTube, if you guys are watching this on YouTube, and if not, you should definitely go over there and look. She's super [00:01:00] adorable. And we're gonna have some other pictures of some things as well. But I say she's roughly a year old because she was found as a stray.
So she had to have her eye enucleated, which means that she had to have her eye removed. This is because when she was found, she had a really bad eye. So since then, though, she's been doing great. She found a great home. One of her moms is a veterinarian at our clinic, but her mom had noticed one day that she just urinated or peed outside of the litter box and brought her in thinking that she might just have a simple urinary tract infection.
Well, when we get urine, so we use the ultrasound to be able to look at the bladder, and then we use a needle that goes through the abdomen into the bladder to remove the urine. It seems like you would think that it would hurt, but I'm not sure.. they really don't notice.
They don't move around very much when we do it. And then the other hard part is like cats definitely do not pee on command. Sometimes we can get male dogs to, but even female dogs it's a really hard thing to do. So this is the best way to get it. [00:02:00] Plus also, it's a very sterile way to get it. So we don't have to worry as much about other bacteria and stuff that makes that urine look like that there's a urinary tract infection when really there's not.
But here's the thing. When she went to go look at the ultrasound to get the urine, she found something that she was not expecting there. So stay tuned to find out exactly what it is that turned this simple peeing once outside the litter box into an emergency flight to Colorado.
Hi, and welcome to Vetsplanation. I'm your veterinary host, Dr. Sugerman, and I'm going to teach you about veterinary medicine. In this podcast, we can dive deeper into the understanding of what our pets are going through and break down medical terms into easier to understand chunks of information. Just a quick disclaimer, this podcast is for informational purposes only.
This is not meant to be a diagnosis for your pet. If you have questions about diagnostics or treatment options, please talk to your veterinarian about those things. Remember, we are [00:03:00] all practicing veterinary medicine and medicine is not an exact science. Your veterinarian may have different treatment options and different opinions.
The information I provide here is to help pet parents have a better understanding about their pets. If you like our podcast, please consider sharing this podcast with at least one friend or just somebody else who has pets as well. Now, let's jump into this week's episode.
Welcome back to vetsplanation. I am your emergency veterinarian and host Dr. Sugerman, so i'm gonna let you know real quick that this is going to be a multi part topic and i'm super excited for this because actually, we're going to be able to talk about multiple aspects of this topic. So let's get back to Moaning Myrtle. So when they looked at her on ultrasound and found that she had looked at her bladder, but also found that her whole belly was full of fluid.
So when they took a sample of that fluid, it was a very yellow, straw colored fluid, viscousy, so if you rubbed it in your fingers, it's gonna feel a little sticky almost. This is [00:04:00] not good, though. There are multiple things that can cause this, so we do have to run additional tests so we can rule things out, essentially.
When we get blood work, we're looking at the protein values, because if they are low in a very specific protein called albumin, then we know that the fluid leaking is into the abdomen.
We also look at the blood work to look at the liver and the kidney values, just in case their organs are starting to fail, or if there are other reasons that might cause them to be too leaky. We look at the fluid sample from the abdomen, because we want to check to see if there's any bacteria, just in case that there's some sort of rupture of the intestines or to look to see if there's a large amount of white blood cells to tell us that there's a lot of inflammation that's in the abdomen.
We compare the urine to the blood because we're also looking for things like a ruptured bladder. We perform radiographs, also known as x rays, because we're looking at the heart in case that there's some sort of heart failure. Her mom unfortunately knew what this is going to be though.
You see, since her mom was an [00:05:00] emergency veterinarian, she knows that as soon as all those tests came back negative, this really just leaves this to be one thing, the one thing she didn't want it to be. So she sent out a panel, which means we took a sample of that fluid and she sent it out to the lab for something called an FIP PCR test.
So let's break down what that means. FIP. It stands for feline infectious peritonitis. So feline pertains to cats, right? Infectious means that it's a disease that was passed from one cat to another. And then peritonitis means that there's some sort of inflammation of the peritoneum, or basically like the lining of the abdomen or like the inside of the abdomen, like things like the lining of the intestines.
FIP comes from a virus that's called feline coronavirus, and this is not the same coronavirus as what COVID is, if you were wondering. They are both coronaviruses, yes. But feline coronavirus is often called FCOV, [00:06:00] and it does not affect humans.
On the other hand, COVID, which is also called SARS CoV 2, in rare cases can affect cats. Even though they're both a coronavirus, they are fairly different though. In FIP, remember that stands for feline, so that means that this virus affects not just our domestic cats, or like essentially our pets, it can also affect wild cats as well.
So it can affect lions, tigers, ligers, bobcats, like it can affect any sort of feline. Now, remember we talked about the I in FIP stands for infectious. Now this means that the cats can get the disease from somebody else, but it's a little more complicated than that. So cats can transmit coronavirus.
Remember I told you that's the starting point of FIP, but they cannot transmit FIP itself. So we're going to talk about why FIP is not transmitted by in just a minute, but we're going to talk about coronavirus first. So this is usually passed [00:07:00] from mom. Mom we call it a queen, to her kittens. So the mom usually spreads it to her kittens at around 5 to 8 weeks old. This is when mom's immunity in the kittens is starting to go down and the kitten's immunity is starting to go up and have its own immunity to problems.
But we have this weird little five day a week old period to where the kitten could definitely get coronavirus. Coronavirus in cats is usually found in the GI tract or basically means in the intestines and commonly known as feline enteric coronavirus. Enteric means intestines essentially.
Most cats who get coronavirus though, you wouldn't even know, they don't even show any symptoms. So therefore you would never know that they actually had coronavirus. Some of them will have like small amounts of diarrhea, or maybe an upper respiratory tract infection, but they recover pretty quickly. And typically they don't even need medication for these symptoms, they usually just resolve on their own.
When a cat gets coronavirus, their own body creates this immune response. It [00:08:00] tells the body to get rid of that virus, and be able to recognize it in the future. So it's like an army. So like you have your first defense in the army. It goes to the bad guys, it goes to the opposing side, and it knows that these are the people that they're supposed to attack, right? Sometimes they'll even put up like posters, pictures, like this is the person we need to attack.
So that's your body's way of knowing like this is something that's wrong. It should not be in your body and it goes and attacks it. This usually occurs within the first five to seven days of becoming infected. So your body responds to it pretty quickly. Now like I said, most cats will be able to fight off this coronavirus, but about 10 percent of cats with coronavirus will actually have coronavirus mutate inside them, or basically change.
It causes them to go and infect the same white blood cells, that are supposed to be getting rid of that virus. The white blood cells are the things like [00:09:00] those soldiers that are supposed to be attacking whatever foreign object, virus, bacteria, whatever it is that's coming to the system. So instead, these viruses are going into the white blood cell to mask themselves.
So the body just sees that there's a white blood cell. It doesn't see it as a virus. And when this mutation occurs, this is when coronavirus changes to FIP. Now FIP can spread throughout the whole body, so it can affect any part of the body. Those white blood cells, they move through the blood vessels, alongside the red blood cells.
So it makes it easy for them to go to other places, like other tissues. When the body realizes this is what's happening, obviously, they're pretty angry. They're like, you've had this Trojan horse that came in, right? Now we have this virus that's everywhere and we've got to get rid of it. So the body pulls out all the stops, creates an intense inflammatory response to this FIP in those blood vessels, which then go to lots of different tissues, [00:10:00] right?
That inflammation occurs in the abdomen, the kidneys, the brain even. It can occur to other weird places too, like the eyes. This can occur over like weeks to months or even years after becoming infected. It's not until the white blood cells figure out that that virus is there, that's when we start creating an immune response.
Now lots of cats have coronavirus, like I said, and only about 10 percent of them who have coronavirus will get FIP. But of those who have FIP, about 70 percent of those are younger than a year and a half, so they're usually pretty young. If that sounds familiar with Moaning Myrtle, I told you she was roughly a year old, right?
Other cats that are more susceptible to this coronavirus and FIP, are cats who are housed in really high populations, like in catteries or in shelters, because kittens are more likely to be exposed in that situation. Any age cat can get this. And in fact, for some unknown reason [00:11:00] purebred cats tend to get this more, male cats get to tend to get this more and geriatric cats can get this a little more often than just adult cats.
Even though the most common time to get this is at about under a year and a half old. There are lots of thoughts as to why maybe purebred cats and geriatric cats can be more affected. In the purebred cats, it's thought because that there could be lots of cats that are in the breeding facilities, that they're more likely to be able to spread it because it's like a cattery still.
And then with geriatric cats, we just assume that they're more affected because their immune system is really too weak to fight off these other infections. So let's talk about the symptoms of FIP. There are actually two types of FIP. We call them either the effusive form, or the wet form, and the non effusive form, or the dry form.
I'll just refer to them as the wet and dry form, I just feel like that's much easier. So at first, both forms will show up with kind of the same symptoms. The cat might have a loss of appetite, lose [00:12:00] weight, become depressed, maybe have a fever. In Moaning Myrtle's case, she actually just urinated outside of the litter box, right?
The wet form of FIP quickly progresses from there though. It progresses to just fluid being either in the abdomen, or the belly basically, or in the thorax, meaning the chest. If it's in the abdomen or the belly, it can actually make them look like they have this really pot bellied appearance.
In either the fluid in the abdomen or the chest, the fluid can become like so much like it can build up so much fluid in there that it even makes it really difficult for them to breathe. So when we remove the fluid, you usually you'll see this yellow kind of sticky fluid, just like I talked about in Moaning Myrtle's case.
Now, in dry FIP, the symptoms are not as easy to recognize. They are usually neurological signs like seizures, or they might look like they're drunk when they're walking. We call that ataxia. And these usually develop a [00:13:00] lot slower than that wet form does. If I see a cat who has seizures or ataxia, that's that wobbliness.
There's a lot of other differentials that I have before FIP, that I have to start thinking about. Things like toxins and meningitis, which I've covered previously, it's an infection of the brain or or epilepsy or even a brain tumor, but FIP dry form of FIP is on that list as well. So let's talk about testing.
Here's one of the sucky things about FIP. There's really no definitive test, unfortunately. Especially in the dry form. We can perform what's called a coronavirus titer, which means that we can test for like how much coronavirus is in their system. Even though they might have a really high coronavirus titer, it doesn't mean that they have FIP, it just means that they have the coronavirus. Remember FIP has to mutate, so it can't just be that it has coronavirus. So if they do have [00:14:00] coronavirus, and I'm concerned that it might be FIP that makes it a little bit higher on my list, but if the Coronavirus test comes back negative, then I'm less concerned that it's gonna be FIP.
There is also a test called a PCR, which basically looks for the DNA of the virus. You can use tissues like from the brain, or the eye, or the kidney, whatever is affected, but these are really invasive things, right? If it's the wet form, you can use the fluid from the abdomen or the chest and run a PCR on that, which is fantastic.
If it's the dry form though, this really isn't a great test. The fluid that they obtained from Moaning Myrtle, it was submitted to the lab for the PCR that we talked about earlier. And it did come back as positive for Coronavirus and for FIP. So let's talk about treatment. Here is our second sucky thing.
So for my entire career, until just recently, FIP was considered a non [00:15:00] treatable disease. And I would highly recommend euthanasia for them, because the chances of them making it through that with hospitalization and everything was only about a 5 percent chance. 95 percent of them were going to pass away, unfortunately.
There have been some breakthroughs, though. Really, this happened because of COVID. We always talk about all these terrible things that COVID did, which it was terrible, but it actually had a really cool thing that came from it. So people often know of the drug called Remdesivir, which is also known as GS 5734, which was used for a lot of patients who had the severe COVID signs.
There's another drug that's like similar to Remdesivir. It's currently called GS441524 and they both have really high success rates with COVID patients. They are an antiviral medication, so it fights against viruses. But it also has a really high [00:16:00] success rate for treating FIP. So about 80 to 100 percent of cats were cured just by giving this medication.
It's a much lower rate for dry FIP though, only about 25 percent were working for dry FIP. But an 80 to 100 percent chance of curing the cat who has wet FIP is pretty amazing. Now, here's the third big problem. One, testing is not great. Two, we didn't have any treatment for this until COVID. But three is this drug is not FDA approved.
And therefore it is illegal for us as a veterinarian to prescribe it. So FDA, that stands for the food and drug administration, and they're responsible for ensuring that safety and efficacy of like human and veterinary drugs. And they do other things as well. Looking at food, medical devices, things like that.
So the company who got Remdesivir approved for severely ill COVID patients, [00:17:00] they were not able to get approval for the other compounds. And really, this is not a full approval. And they did not get it for approval for any veterinary use either, because they're worried that if there was some sort of like undesirable effect that was discovered, then Remdesivir would not be able to be used for humans.
So since Remdesivir is only conditionally approved for emergency use in humans, not fully FDA approved. That means that it cannot be used off label by us as a veterinarian. So it means that it is illegal for me to prescribe it or to use it for a cat. So studies have been done though at universities because it doesn't have to be prescribed in those settings.
It's not prescribed by a veterinarian, it's used for a study. In these studies at these universities, they're trying to prove these medications are useful for cats, but it does not guarantee that the drug is going to be approved for veterinary use. Ideally, both these drugs will be approved for veterinary use[00:18:00] and specifically FDA approved for cats.
But even if they just have a full approval for use in humans, then it would allow veterinarians to legally prescribe these medications off label, which means that the drug isn't licensed for an animal. They didn't say specifically it's okay for animals, but at that point we still can prescribe it.
So how do we get these drugs that, you know? Can drastically change the outcome from 95 percent chance that they're gonna die to an 80 to 100 percent chance that they're gonna survive. There are a few ways. The most common way used to be that people would go to a specific Facebook page I'm not gonna say where but they would get their medication by these people who had purchased Remdesivir from people from other countries and they would be shipped in a vial which had no, it didn't say what it was.
There's no label or anything on it. Those people would then pass these vials onto the next cats who had [00:19:00] FIP to give them. But there's a lot of problems with that. So it's unlabeled. We have no way to know what that is. We don't know if it's Remdesivir in there or not, or some other drug or some other compound.
There's no way to know. And it could be detrimental by giving it. We can't test it, so we just don't know. So for a while, people had to just take their chances. They had to hope that they got the drug that is the correct drug, and somebody didn't mess with them by selling them a drug that wasn't the correct drug that's gonna kill their cat anyways.
That's a hard thing to go through because you just don't know. But if it's gonna give you any sort of a chance, better than a 5 percent chance that they're gonna make it, then, then definitely that was a way that people were turning to. Luckily, that is not the only way now, though.
So there are some trials at veterinary teaching hospitals that are going on. They use these drugs to determine the effects on cats with FIP, any side effects that may occur, when you should give them, other drugs you should give them with. So we [00:20:00] have something that's happening at least. These drugs have shown great results in the laboratory, so now they're like trying to reach out to pet parents to get other factors going as far as like pills versus injectables, and all sorts of things.
Colorado State University is doing one right now. I believe it's Dr. Cerna, I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing your name, but I think it's 'Cierna' or Cerna is heading up a study to see if this other drug called Molnupiravir or EIDD 2 8 0 1, which is something that helps stimulate the immune response. She's trying to see if that can be given orally, or by mouth, with the Remdesivir to see if it can cause a faster recovery of clinical signs.
She also wants to see if it improves blood work abnormalities, and also to see if it lowers the rate of cats relapsing back into FIP after treatment had been completed. All the cats get Remdesivir still in the study, but only some of them will get the [00:21:00] Molnupiravir, which is like I said, an immune stimulant.
So it increases the body's immune response to COVID in humans. In humans it was found to introduce errors into the COVID virus genetic code. So it makes it to where the COVID virus cannot mutate as well or it cannot become as virulent or as bad. The great thing about this study is that every animal still gets the medication to help clear FIP.
The cost of the drugs, the exam fee, the testing, and the blood work are all covered in this 12 week study. You do have to get your cat there, though. That's the biggest problem. So you gotta get your cat there by plane, car, whatever it is, and this is a very fast thing. You need to get them in as quick as possible after they've been diagnosed.
The longer the FIP goes on, the less likely they're gonna make it to that appointment. There are some eligibility criteria that your [00:22:00] cat would have to meet though, and I'll link the website to the show notes, so that if you're considering it, you should just make sure that your cat does fit that criteria.
You would have to return to Colorado at four weeks, eight weeks, and twelve week mark. So that means you have to go four times. So the initial visit, four weeks, eight weeks, twelve weeks. That way that you can recheck the cat and then also recheck blood work as well.
Unfortunately, you can't just send in the samples, like they actually do have to be there. The deadline for this study is December 31st of 2024. So we do have a whole year pretty much from this podcast or essentially 11 months to be able to try to get cats in. And there's always new trials that are coming up.
So you can always like Google to see if there's any new trials at any vet hospitals near you. But at this time, Colorado was the only one that I could find that was an active one. This is the study that Moaning Myrtle is in, so therefore we'll be able to get updates on how she's doing with this medication, and so far it sounds like she's doing fantastic.
So now you might be thinking, why do [00:23:00] we care about this disease? It only affects 10 percent of cats that even have coronavirus in the first place. First of all, if I could save even those 10 percent cats with just a pill. That would be freaking amazing, right? If I did not have to tell people there's a 95 percent chance your cat is going to die, then I would rather not do that.
I'd rather say, here's a pill that you're going to take for a week, and we're going to save your cat. But second, because there is something that happened last year, the beginning of 2023, that kind of made us rethink whether FIP is actually transmittable or not, and not just coronavirus that mutated.
So there's this island in the Mediterranean called Cyprus, and it's really famous for these free-roaming cats. It sounds like my son's paradise. He loves cats and I'm sure he would love to live here with just cats roaming everywhere, but it's a little, little paradise island for our cats, essentially.
Within the first few months of 2023, there was a 40 fold increase in the number of cats who [00:24:00] developed FIP on the island. So researchers have postulated that together with this like new coronavirus and a mutated FIP that they can become a single pathogen or single new virus that created an FIP that can now be spread through infection. And it can be directly transmitted from one cat to another and not that it has to be coronavirus transmitted from one cat to another that then mutates.
It is actually FIP that is translated from one cat to another. This is not definitive at this point. This is just a theory. And if this happens though, then it will make it so that that 10 percent of cats who get FIP will skyrocket and will absolutely need these medications in order to be able to help our cats.
One other thing I have to mention about these medications, there have been a few cats that did develop this like weird bladder stone. After analyzing these bladder stones, they had looked into all these cats histories, and then found that these cats had stones [00:25:00] that were the result of the cats all being given Remdemsivir or that similar drug GS441524. This is only a few cats though that have gotten this and honestly I'd rather risk having to do surgery on a cat who's alive to remove these stones in a little while versus having a cat that didn't make it because they died from FIP.
So as I said in the beginning, this is the first part of this series. We will be talking to Moaning Myrtle's mom, very excited about that, about what happened from diagnosis to finding this trial to flying out to Colorado and her experience there. And then how she's been doing with her medications and her experience with the medication.
As she goes through and does her follow ups, hopefully we'll get some updates on those as well. And then I'm also hoping that we're going to be able to speak to the doctor who's running the study. So we can just talk to her about enrollment and what this study really means.
All right guys, now we're going to do our animal fact for the day.
So today we're going to be talking about the largest rodent of the [00:26:00] world, which is the capybara. The best way to describe them is that they do look like a giant brown guinea pig essentially. They actually are related to guinea pigs as they're both in the cavy family. They weigh somewhere between 77 to 145 pounds.
That is bigger than my Great Dane. My Great Dane is 110 pounds. That's pretty, pretty gigantic for a rodent. And they can be as high as two feet high from the bottom of their feet to essentially their shoulders. They're basically like twice the size of a beaver too. They are found in South America where they live in both these really dense forests but also the savannas.
And randomly they've been found in a small group in Florida because apparently everything can survive in Florida.
They often can be found in places like big bodies of water or small bodies of water like lakes, rivers, swamps. They're herbivores meaning they eat plants but they also prefer to eat aquatic plants. [00:27:00] They do eat other things, like certain types of grasses, they're very picky about their grasses, as well as like fruit and tree bark.
It's really funny that they're so picky about grasses, but they'll eat tree bark, right? You don't usually think of a guinea pig being aquatic, but capybaras are actually semi aquatic. They have webbed feet, so they're great for swimming. And their fur is really like it's, it's almost stringy and tough, like you know on those fake brooms and stuff that you get for Halloween? Like it almost feels like that kind of material, like it's very wiry. That's a good word. So their, their fur is almost like wiry, which is really good for how the fur dries. And helps it dry very quickly. They can swim underwater and hold their breath for almost five minutes at a time.
And they even sleep in the water sometimes. They take naps in there. On their head, their eyes, ears and nose are all on the top of their head. That allows them to rest their [00:28:00] head on the bank of the water, sitting there, while the rest of their body is in the water, so it allows them to watch out for most of their predators.
Most of the predators are ones that are on land. So jaguars, ocelots, and pumas, but the most common underwater predator is going to be the green anaconda and caimans, which are kind of like an alligator. But they also have predators in the air as well. Eagles will also try to get them too.
My son, Oren, and I had talked before about guinea pigs and how they require extra vitamin C in their diet. And capybaras need the same thing. If they don't get enough vitamin C, they can get scurvy, just like what sailors got a long time ago when they didn't have any fruit and oranges on board.
Speaking of extra things they eat, they do also do something called autocaprophagia, which means that they eat their own feces. They usually do this in the morning. Rabbits do this as well because their feces contains a lot of bacteria in it. And that helps them digest the [00:29:00] plant material that they normally eat.
They're really social animals so they prefer to be in groups and sometimes you'll even find them in groups of like up to 40 animals at a time. They're also really social with other animals as well. So they've been known to be the "moving chairs" because they have like birds and rabbits and monkeys even that just sit on them and ride on them.
Usually it's for some sort of symbiotic relationship though. Like with birds, the birds will pick off a lot of the parasites helping the capybara. The bird gets to eat those insects then. People even sometimes keep these guys as pets because they're actually so social.
They can be found in the United States, but they are illegal in some states. And if they are kept, they really shouldn't be kept alone. They should be kept at least in a pair so that they don't feel lonely.
They are also really vocal animals. So they do a variety of things like purring and barking and cackling, whistling, squealing, whining, grunting, and even like teeth chattering to communicate with each other, which is [00:30:00] a very common thing with guinea pigs as well. All right guys, that is my talk on FIP and on capybaras.
So if you have any questions, as always, please email me or find me on Facebook or Instagram. I am going to be talking to Moaning Myrtle's mom soon here, so we can talk about how she's doing and how everything went and what she had to go through so far.
And then, as always, if you have somebody else who is really interested in animals, who loves animals as much as we do. Please share this podcast with somebody. And then hit like and subscribe. We really appreciate that. We want to make sure we can keep our podcast going so we can just help as many animal and pet parents as possible.
All right. Thank you everybody. And as always, please keep your pet happy, safe, and healthy. Bye guys
Hey guys, real quick, I do have an addendum to make to this, so, you know, studies are always kind of hard to read what exactly their goal is and what [00:31:00] exactly medications they're using and stuff, and I thought that I had understood which medications are being used, so I just want to go back to the study that they're doing in Colorado State, so they're not actually using Remdesivir for it, they're actually using the other drug, Molnipi... Molnupiravir... Varir?
These are so hard to say, sorry. So they're using that as their antiviral medication, and then they're using a different drug as an immunostimulant. All the cats are going to be getting the Molnupiravir? Molnupiravir. There we go. But only some of them will be getting the immunostimulant, meaning something that's going to help stimulate their immune system, to see if they get over FIP faster, and to see if they have less rebound or less reoccurrence of this.
The other half are going to be getting just a placebo, so just meaning just a medication that's not going to do anything for them. So they're still both getting the antiviral medication, [00:32:00] but like I said, only one group is going to be getting the immunostimulant, so it's something to try to see if it helps them get over this faster.
The other thing about the study is that , it's going on for the whole year, but they do have limited spots for this, so it's not going to be like literally you could get in probably in December, like it's going to be limited spots, but like I said, there's always studies going on, so I always suggest like going online to see if you can find a study that's going on now, whenever you're listening to this podcast to see if you could find one to be able to get them into the study to be able to get them the medication.
Thank you guys. I'm sorry about that. Like I said, it's not always easy to kind of figure all of these things out, especially when I'm not the one doing the study. So, all right. If you have any questions again, please always let me know. Thanks guys.
Thank you guys for listening this week. If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or you just want to say hi, you can email me at Suggs, S U G G S @ VetsplanationPodcast.com or visit the website at [00:33:00] VetsplanationPodcast.com or find us on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok at Vetsplanation. Thank you all for listening and I'll see you back here next week.