Understanding Feline Panleukopenia
Today we delve into feline panleukopenia, a highly contagious and often fatal viral disease that can affect all domestic and wild cats, especially kittens. Feline panleukopenia, also known as feline infectious enteritis or feline distemper, is caused by the parvovirus, which can persist for over a year in the environment and be transmitted through contact with infected animals, their feces, or contaminated surfaces.
Although this disorder is now rare among vaccinated cats, infection rates remain high in unvaccinated cat populations. I will explain how veterinarians diagnose and treat this deadly virus, and the extensive care required to give infected cats a fighting chance to recover. We will also explore whether feline panleukopenia can infect dogs, and what the prognosis is for cats that have been exposed to high amounts of the virus. Tune in to better understand this serious disease that can have devastating consequences for our feline companions.
What You’ll Learn:
What is feline panleukopenia?
The difference between feline and canine parvovirus.
Who is most commonly affected by feline panleukopenia?
If feline parvo can infect dogs as well.
How cats become infected by feline panleukopenia.
How a fever can be a good thing.
How panleukopenia is diagnosed.
Ideas Worth Sharing:
“Cats become infected by coming into contact with secretion from another infected cat.” - Tyler Sugerman
“It is always better to prevent infection by vaccinating our pets rather than treating them once they’re already infected.” - Tyler Sugerman
“No medication can kill panleukopenia. All we can do is give them extensive care so they can get through this disease and hopefully recover from it.” - Tyler Sugerman
Resources Mentioned:
ASPCA 888-426-4435 or pet poison helpline 855-764-7661
Feline Panleukopenia Outbreaks and Risk Factors in Cats in Animal Shelters
Read The Transcript:
Welcome to Vetsplanation. I'm your veterinary host, Tyler, or you can call me Suggs. This podcast is about educating pet parents about what is going on with their furry little loved ones. As an emergency veterinarian, I understand how hard it is to explain complex diseases in terms that are understandable for pet parents in a few short minutes before the next critical case comes in.
In this podcast, we can dive deeper into understanding of what our pets are going through and break down those complex 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 of your pet. If you have questions about diagnostics or treatment options, please talk to your veterinarian about those things.
Remember, we are all practicing veterinary medicine, and medicine is not an exact science. Your veterinarian may have different treatment options. The information I provide here is to help pet parents, and it's not related to my place of work. I'm here for you guys to provide free information and knowledge.
If you like our podcast, consider sharing this podcast with at least one friend or someone else who has pets and could benefit from this.
Now, let's jump into this week's episode.
Tyler Sugerman: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast.
So, today, I'm actually doing the podcast during the day, which I don't normally do. I actually usually do this at night, like at 2:00 AM. So, if you hear a lot of animals walking around above me, my dog's barking, my kids running around, going to apologize for that right now.
But today, we're going to be talking about cats because we've done a lot about talking about dogs recently. So, we're going to focus on cats for a minute. We're going to talk about something called feline panleukopenia.
So, I'm just going to break down that word really quickly. So, pan means all, leuko means white blood cell, and penia means we have less. So, we have less of all of the white blood cells. That's what panleukopenia means.
So, we're going to talk about what it is, how cats get it, who's most affected, how we diagnose it, how we treat it, and then like the prognosis is of these cats who do get it.
So, let's start out with what is feline panleukopenia. So, it is a really highly contagious virus that gets passed between cat to cat. And when we talk about this virus, everybody thinks that the virus is panleukopenia, but actually, the virus is feline parvovirus.
So, for everybody who has listened to the canine parvovirus, you're going to see that there's a lot of similarities between canine parvovirus and feline parvovirus. They're not actually the same virus though. With the canine parvovirus, it is technically a different disease, but it's very related to feline parvovirus.
There are actually three parvo viruses that are really related. We have the canine parvovirus, the feline parvovirus, and the mink enteritis virus. It's random. But we put them all into this category called the carnivore protoparvovirus 1.
I'm only mentioning that because you'll hear later on about how we can have some like cross-contamination from that. But they all are very related but not the exact same virus.
Now, the feline parvovirus is present everywhere in the environment. It is found all across the parts of the United States, like pretty much everywhere and it's in most of the countries around the world as well.
The main reservoirs, the main places that we see a lot of outbreaks are usually going to be in like kennels, in pet shops, animal shelters, in unvaccinated feral colonies. And then in areas where there's a lot of cats that are being housed together.
So, like think about people who have a lot of cats, like if there's a lot of cats in the household and we have unvaccinated cats with vaccinated cats, then we do get a higher percentage of cats that end up having panleukopenia.
And real quick, you'll hear me use like panleukopenia and feline parvovirus interchangeably since they are the same thing.
The other thing about the environment and passing things back and forth is that in the warmer months you're actually going to see more panleukopenia than in the colder months.
Because typically, in the colder months, the cats don't really want to go outside very much. They're not really intermingling very much. And when it becomes warm, people will let their cats outside more or they escape more, because they do that.
Or you're going to have a lot of cats who are going into heat. And so, we have a lot more cats that are intermingling and are going up to each other. And so, we have a lot more contact with those other cats.
So, let's talk about like who's affected. The kittens are the most severely affected and this is because they just don't have that immunity to it. Usually, these are unvaccinated kittens at this point.
So, the most common age for kittens is between three to five months old that they can get panleukopenia. And unfortunately, like death is more common in this age because they just don't have the immune system and it's much harder for them to fight it off.
But even with like cats who are vaccinated, if they are like immunocompromised, if they have some other disease that's going on that makes their immune system not work as well, they can still get it, even if they've been vaccinated for it before.
This can affect all felines too. So, by that, we mean it can affect our domestic cats and it can affect our wildcats. So, it can affect bobcats, it can affect lions, tigers. Like pretty much anything that's a form of cat can be affected by this.
And they also, think that there are some families of minks and raccoons that can also, be affected by this too, which is super interesting. When I think of a raccoon, I think of it more as like has a lot more like dog things that it can get. But this is definitely a cat thing that it can get.
Now, one question I get asked commonly is, “Can it affect me as a human?” And no, it does not affect humans.
The second most common question I get is, “Can it affect dogs?” So, here's the interesting thing about that, you know how I was talking about how they're all very related to each other. These three canine parvo, feline parvo and our mink enteritis viruses.
So, even though feline parvo doesn't necessarily affect the dogs, (so the feline parvo cannot) but they've shown some studies that have actually seen that some cats who have been shedding the feline parvo can also, shed very small amounts of canine parvo as well.
So, it's a really small amount, so they think that there's just not going to be a huge component of dogs that do become affected.
But let's say you have a dog that is immunocompromised, even that little bit may still be enough to be able to infect the dog then with the canine parvovirus version of that. Not the feline parvo but the canine parvo version.
And likewise, kind of the opposite as well for our cats. So, there have been instances where you can have some canine parvoviruses that have affected domestic cats and larger felines.
So, I don't believe there's been any studies that have shown that the feline parvovirus is being shed in the canine parvovirus. I believe that they just think that some cats can potentially get the canine parvovirus since cats have been known to shed some canine parvovirus as well.
So, super interesting. That's actually a fact that I did not know from before.
Alright, let's talk about how do the cats become infected. This is by coming into contact with any sort of secretion from the infected cat. So, let's say we have Fluffy is infected, has feline parvovirus unfortunately.
Anything that Fluffy has that's a secretion. Meaning when she urinates, when she defecates, when she has snot that she sneezes, if she coughs and has those droplets of saliva that come out, any of those are considered secretions. Even like the tears from the eyes are secretions.
Any of those can be a reservoir for shedding all of that parvovirus. So, it can come out in any part of that.
The good part of this is that even though it can come out pretty much anywhere, the infected cats usually, only shed for a very short period of time. So, those viruses are only in those secretions for about one to two days like once they've started showing these symptoms.
Which isn't too bad. Canine parvo virus is actually for a longer period of time in dogs. So, this than cats is much better.
But just like canine parvovirus, it can live in the environment for a long period of time. So, for the feline parvovirus, it can live in the environment for up to a year. In canine parvovirus, they've actually found that it can live in soil and stuff for six years but feline parvovirus for up to a year.
And this means not just like in the environment outside in soil, this also, means anything that the cat has come into contact with. So, if Fluffy has come into contact with the bedding, if she has eaten out of the same bowl, drank out of the same water bowl, and in the same kennel.
Or your hands like you're touching Fluffy and then you go over and you start touching Peter or whoever your other cat is, who is not infected, you can pass that very easily from cat to cat, just even on you. Even on your clothing or your cat's clothing if you want to dress up your cat, any of those things can be a reservoir for it.
So, even though, let's say with your clothing, maybe you wear the same sweatshirt all the time. Like you don't have to wear your sweatshirt and then like wash it constantly.
So, let's say you wear your sweatshirt, you're hanging out with Fluffy and you just got this new kitten, Peter as well, but Fluffy's really sick and then you go over and you start doing stuff with Peter, even days later, you can still pass this feline parvo from the infected cat to the uninfected cat a year later.
So, we have to be really careful with this disease and I'll talk later about like how we're going to help clean this up as well.
And then another super crazy thing is that they've found that even the fleas of infected cats that go to the uninfected cat can also, have that parvovirus that they move from the uninfected cat to the infected cat.
That's really interesting. Like we talk about all these reasons for like why we should use sleep prevention and stuff. That is a super interesting one. Like if we have a kitten who is unvaccinated who has been potentially exposed, putting sleep prevention on it may be a helpful thing.
Now, the incubation period for this is usually about two to seven days. What that means is usually that's about the time that we have between when that uninfected cat has been exposed.
So, if Peter, our uninfected cat, was exposed on Monday, he may not show signs until Wednesday or even to the following Monday, even though he was exposed on that Monday. Because it takes that much time for it to start replicating inside their body to make them become infected.
Now, with our replication, like how does this affect our cats, how does parvo affect the cats? It infects all the rapidly growing cells, meaning anything that is dividing very quickly.
So, in kittens, that's why it loves kittens so much, they're growing so fast and so they have lots of rapidly dividing cells or rapidly growing cells.
Some of the places it really likes to hit is going to be the bone marrow, the intestines, and also, fetuses of any pregnant female cats.
So, we're going to talk a little bit about the clinical signs so that you kind of understand like how it's affecting each one of those areas that parvovirus likes to infect. So, we'll first talk about the bone marrow and lymph nodes.
So, with the bone marrow and lymph nodes, what they do is they help make white blood cells. They do lots of other things as well, but this is one of the things it does, it helps make white blood cells.
So, if they cannot make more white blood cells, now, we create a shortage in white blood cells. Meaning we have panleukopenia, we don't have enough white blood cells.
Usually, it starts out with it'll destroy all the neutrophils. And for anybody who has listened to the blood work podcast, you'll kind of understand this a little bit better.
But when neutrophils are there, neutrophils are a type of white blood cell and they like to go and be like the first line of defense. They go and try to kill anything that is an invader. So, neutrophils see that there's an invasion, they go there but then they're all destroyed and the bone marrow cannot make more of them.
The next ones that we see is going to be the lymphocytes. Lymphocytes are another type of white blood cell. They're a little more strategic though. They're usually there to like try to help plan the attack almost. But they go though now, they're all destroyed and our bone marrow and lymph nodes cannot make any more of them.
There are lots of other white blood cells, but those are kind of our two main important ones for trying to fight off this infection.
So, now, we have this panleukopenia. So, when this panleukopenia occurs, now, we have a fever and it can be waxing and waning, meaning sometimes we have the fever and sometimes we don't. Sometimes they're normal.
Their temperatures can range between like 104 to 107 for these temperatures in these cats who have fevers. And about at 105, that's when we start worrying about like brain trauma and stuff. So, we do want to try to get it under control as much as we possibly can.
And then it can also, cause lethargy. So, meaning they're just really dumpy, really tired. They don't want to move. Like you look at them and they just look sick. They can have that nasal discharge. So, discharge from the nose, discharge from the eyes, we'll sometimes call that ocular nasals discharge.
And eventually, that fever can turn to hypothermia, meaning that their temperature drops really low. And that's not good either. That usually, like occurs shortly before they die unfortunately.
Real quick to just talk about fever because I don't want people to see fever and these really high temperatures and start giving their cats like a ice bath or anything. Fevers are actually there to help protect the body. We want the cat to have a fever because remember what I just said, hypothermia is bad.
So, we want the cat to have somewhat of a fever, not a detrimental one, but somewhat of a fever because we want the body to be responding. That means that is a good thing. The body is trying to fight off the infection.
Fevers are very different than something called hyperthermia, meaning that their body temperature is too high because they cannot get rid of the heat. So, that's things like they get stuck in a dryer or they get stuck in a car that's really hot.
Those cats, yes, we need to bring their temperatures down but not for a fever. For a fever, we're not going to be like ice packing them or giving them cold baths or anything. Like we are going to let them just fight off their fever.
Alright, now, let's talk about that second most common place that parvovirus likes to attack. That's going to be our intestines.
So, it usually causes vomiting. The vomiting typically, occurs like one to two days after the fever has started. And typically, they're vomiting up bile.
Side note real quick, it's B as in boy, bile. Not vile like V as in Victor. It's bile that they'll vomit up and it's usually like this yellow or green material. Because typically, they're not eating at this point, they feel terrible. They're usually like drooling excessively.
Sometimes they'll have diarrhea. And that's actually usually the first time when people start thinking about panleukopenia is when they start having really bad diarrhea.
But vomiting is actually the very first thing that happens, not diarrhea. So, even if they're not having diarrhea yet, we still need to be thinking about it potentially being panleukopenia.
But back to that diarrhea, it can also, be a hemorrhagic diarrhea, meaning that it's really bloody. Hemorrhage means bleeding essentially. So, it can be really bloody diarrhea as well. That's not in as many cases, that's in about three to 15% of cases, but still a possibility.
Like I said, they're really nauseous, they aren't eating so we'll call that like hyporexia or anorexia and then they'll be extremely dehydrated, which happens very fast because they're really small.
And then also, they're losing so much fluid by this vomiting and the diarrhea and their nasal excretions or their snottiness, they're tearing from their eyes. Like they're losing a lot of fluid and they're not able to drink.
One of the things that people will often say is that they'll see them sitting in front of the water bowl just like for hours even, and just not able to drink. Like they are so dehydrated and so thirsty but they're so nauseous that they cannot drink.
Our exams sometimes will also, feel that their intestines are really thickened and that their lymph nodes are really thickened as well. And that can kind of clue us off too.
Other places that we have rapidly growing cells are going to be when we have those pregnant cats. So, it'll be in things like the brains and the eyes of the fetuses. And in these situations, what happens is the cat who's pregnant may be ill, but it may not even be that you see very many clinical signs from it.
It may just be a fever for a day or two and you don't really notice or just a little bit of sneezing, you don't really notice. But that's because they're all going to those rapidly dividing cells, which is the kittens. That's going to be those fetuses that are in there.
What happens is a couple of things. It depends on like where in the pregnancy this starts. Sometimes it'll just be that they have like embryonic reabsorption, meaning that they're really tiny embryos and so, the body just kind of reabsorbs them and so, they're just not pregnant anymore.
It could be that they abort the litter so they'll just unfortunately, like have the kittens and they're not ready to be born yet. It could be that you have fetal mummification, meaning that the fetus then becomes like this dried little shriveled up thing. So, it's not alive anymore, it's just mummified now.
Also, stillbirths are the other thing. You could have a lot of stillbirths in a litter too. So, when we talk about like cats who are having a lot of stillbirths in a litter, like this is one of the things I often say could potentially be a problem.
Now, if the kitten is born, let's say they went through the pregnancy, mom did have panleukopenia, we didn't even know it and the kittens are born, then some of the clinical signs we're going to see is that we can have severe damage to the cerebellum.
So, the big part of the brain that people like show on TV all the time, like the big part there, that's called the cerebrum. So, that does lots and lots and lots of different functions. Obviously, it's the really big part of the brain so it does tons of things.
But the back of that, so there's another like it almost looks like another little brain, a tiny brain in the back of your big brain and that's called the cerebellum. That is there to help control your movements. Like it controls your nerves, your muscles, your bones, it helps move your body around.
So, when the fetuses are affected by the feline parvovirus, it goes and attacks the cerebellum. So, the back part of that, like I said, that controls movements. And it causes a syndrome … is two different names.
But the syndrome is either called feline cerebellar ataxia. Ataxia means that they're very wobbly or cerebellar hypoplasia. That's the term that I've normally used, is cerebellar hyperplasia. But they're interchangeable. Either one mean the exact same thing.
And what happens is these often look like they have what's called intention tremors, meaning you'll see them like attempting to like walk and attempting to move or attempting to go to their food bowl and like they're tremoring, they're shaking or sometimes they're like rocking back and forth trying to do it because their body is so uncoordinated that they can't figure out that movement.
There are cats who do live with cerebellar hypoplasia and they end up being okay. They don't go back to normal most of the time. They still have their issues as far as tremors and stuff. And it depends on like how badly they're affected as to like how badly this affects their life in general.
If they're so bad that they can't even like eat their own food, that might not be very good because then you're going to have to hand feed them constantly to get them to be able to eat.
Versus I've definitely had some other cats — one of our professors at school, she had a cat that had cerebellar hypoplasia and that cat could like jump up and down off of things. It was very clumsy and it would hit things a lot but it could still jump up and down off of things.
So, it really just kind of depends as to like where in the pregnancy and how much is truly affected.
It could also, affect their eyes as well. So, it could make them blind or have like spots in their eyes, which is something that you can't see just by looking at them. Like we have to look with an ophthalmoscope or those little instruments that we look in the back of the eyes with or we look at the eyes with.
We have to look at one of those to be able to see the back of the eye to see if that's what's affecting them.
Alright, let's talk about like how is this diagnosed now? We know what all the clinical signs are, how do we diagnose this?
So, there's no test that you can run in the clinic that's going to be able to tell you if they have feline panleukopenia or feline parvo.
But we do use canine parvo tests because we talked about how they're very closely related. It is not a hundred percent accurate so you can get false negatives from that. But we use a canine parvo test.
And what we do for that is you take like a swab of their feces and then we put it into this little container, swish it around and then put it into another little testing strip and see if it becomes positive.
It does take like about 10, 15 minutes usually to run those tests, not very long. And if it's positive then we're pretty sure it's positive. If it's negative, we are still not a hundred percent sure if that's the case.
The other things that we can use is blood work. So, we talked about in the name, it is panleukopenia. So, we should be able to do blood work and see if they have white blood cells.
Now, there are a couple caveats to this because cats are never simple. Medicine is never simple.
So, it could start out with it just being a neutropenia, like we said, the neutrophils go and they attack first. So, if we have low neutrophils or neutropenia, then that could be the start of this. We're at just the beginning.
Ideally, what we want to see on blood work is that we have both neutropenia and lymphopenia. So, both are neutrophils and our lymphocytes, which are white blood cells, are low.
But you can also, have a rebound neutrophilia. Neutrophilia means that we have high neutrophils or high one of those white blood cells. And that occurs during when we have like a recovery period. So, they're starting to feel better.
Now, all of that makes this a little bit harder for us, when we're looking at blood work. So, sometimes we just have to go off of clinical signs and what we see on blood work to determine if this is what it is.
We do have testing that you can send out to the lab. The hardest part about that is that it does take days to get back and we don't have days until we can start treating them. So, sometimes we'll send that out.
But also, some other things that may complicate this. So, you're going to see that we'll like run other testing as well.
It's not going to be just that parvo test or just the CBC, which is where we look at the white blood cells. So, it's called the complete blood cell count where we're looking at white blood cells and red blood cells. We're likely going to be looking at other things as well.
So, doing things like looking at their chemistry, so looking to see what their kidneys and their liver values and everything look like. And you can listen to that as on the blood work podcast one.
But we're also, probably going to be doing an FeLV/FIV test. I'll go into those on another podcast. But they're two viruses that can make them kind of sick for a life. FeLV is feline leukemia virus and FIV is feline immunodeficiency virus.
So, both of those can affect the cat, make it immunocompromised like we were talking about before. We can have a cat who's been fully vaccinated but it has some immunocompromised state, so some disease or some virus or something else that's making them sick from this feline parvo even though they've been vaccinated for it.
Salmonellosis is another one and that's not really one that we can easily test for. So, it becomes a little bit more complicated as well.
Like when they have salmonellosis it looks a lot like all these other things that we're seeing for feline panleukopenia. So, we kind of have to hope that we're treating the correct thing if that's the case.
And sometimes just sending out that that PCR testing or that testing that goes to the lab, can help so that we know like are we on the right track? Because if it comes back as all negative, then maybe we were on the wrong track all along.
Right now, let's talk about what is the prognosis for these guys. So, for our kittens who are like eight weeks and old and under, it's not a very good prognosis. These are pretty sick cats and like I said, they don't really have a good immune system to be able to fight it off.
And for all cats without treatment, the prognosis is what we call grave. That is bad, 90% of them will die. So, they do need to be treated for these things.
For our older cats, with treatment, a lot of times the prognosis is much better. Like if they're treated early on in the disease, that's really good for them, they're more likely to make a recovery.
And if the cat survives the first five days of being sick, the chances of recovery are hugely improved. Like this disease already seldom lasts for longer than like about five to seven days. Typically, by that five to seven-day mark, they're already feeling better.
Now, let's talk about how we're going to treat this. So, feline parvo, it's a virus like we said. There is no medication that will kill this virus. Just like we had when we talked about canine parvovirus, no medication is going to kill it.
All we can do is give them extensive care and critical support to try to get them through this disease so that they can recover from it.
Some of the things we want to do is one, keep them in isolation. So, if you're doing treatment at home, keep them in a room that's like no cat could even come to the door of that door.
So, behind two doors so that way, we don't have the cat's intermingling at all and then creating havoc throughout the rest of the house.
If you're doing things at home, also, it's keeping your clothes really clean. So, having clothes that you only wear with the kitten that is affected or cat that is affected. Changing your clothes, washing your hands. You are just practicing really good hygiene so that we're not again, moving our infection from cat to cat.
We do the same thing when we are at the clinic. So, we actually have an isolation room that we wear a special gown for that when we go in there we do everything we need to do with the cat, with gowns, gloves.
And then when we go out of that room we are changing out of the gown, throwing away our gloves. We have booties on that we don't wear outside of that room. Like it is a very isolated area.
The biggest part of treatment now, is going to be correcting the dehydration. For our cats that are in the clinic, we are hospitalizing them and for kittens I recommend hospitalizing them almost no matter what. But giving them IV fluids is going to be the best thing that we can do for them.
We also, need to stop vomiting. So, we would need to try to stop all these things that are creating them having a loss of fluid. So, we need to stop that vomiting so we're giving them medication to help stop that.
A lot of times you'll see that as something called like Cerenia is the most common one. People may also use like ondansetron, which is same thing as like Zofran. Or they may use Reglan, which is a medication that tries to help like move the intestines.
That doesn't really help stop the vomiting but it does help like move things along. So, our intestines are not doing well when they have this virus in.
And then speaking of the intestines, we also want to help with the nutrition part of this. So, we want to give them very small amounts very often. We do this as what's called trickle feeding. So, typically, we'll put in like a tube that goes in the nose and then goes down into the stomach. It's called a nasogastric tube.
And that helps us to be able to like give them small amounts of food. We do just like a constant rate of it. So, like we'll do just constant feeding so that it's very small amounts all the time. That way it makes it easier for the intestines.
It actually does help with the intestines to help promote like healing of the mucosa of the intestines. So, when you think about the intestines, there's like all these little villi is what they're called.
If you can imagine like in The Little Mermaid, they were in Ursula's cave. There were like these little … I think they were green. I can't remember if they're green or purple.
But all the little spirits of the mermaids and stuff that like didn't fulfill their promise to Ursula. I think they were green if I remember correctly. But these little weird like things that are poking up from the ground. Like that is the best way I can describe what villi are. They're these little weird like finger-like projections that are poking out from the intestines.
And they're there for a very specific purpose. They're there to help with like getting nutrients back into the body.
But those are being killed off by this parvovirus and bacteria and stuff is being able to go across the normal membranes that we can have there in place to try to help stop infection.
It can then cross all those barriers and then make the cat even sicker in those cases because all the bacteria that you normally have in your intestines can now, go into the bloodstream.
So, we want to try to help prevent that by coding all of that GI mucosa so that we don't have that bacteria able to go through there.
It also, helps just reestablish that barrier, so like it helps it to heal. So, all those little finger-like projections, the villi can start regrowing back.
The other thing what we're going to do is we are going to put them on antibiotics. So, the antibiotics is not there to help kill off the parvovirus. We just talked about how all that bacteria can cross from the intestines into the bloodstream.
That's essentially what we're trying to kill off. We're trying to kill off any secondary infections. Anything that's occurring because of our immune system not working right now.
You can have lots of other bacterial infections that occur because your immune system isn't working.
If they're already fighting off panleukopenia or feline parvo and we then give them also, like an upper respiratory tract infection or something else. Bacteria from a cut or just bacteria on their skin. We want to try to help fight those things off as well.
So, we're often times giving them antibiotics, sometimes multiple antibiotics to try to help with all of those infections. Depending on how sick they are, depends on like how much we're going to be doing as far as supportive care too. So, sometimes we will give them something called fresh frozen plasma.
What that is, is if you were to look at your blood, you have red blood cells in there, you have white blood cells in there, you have clotting factors. But essentially, like we divided into two things. Red blood cells and then everything else is kind of in this water state called plasma.
So, we're trying to give them back those clotting factors like things to help make sure they start clotting. It also, has lots of other things like other proteins and stuff in it that we're trying to give back to them, so that way they're able to keep as much fluid in their bloodstream as possible. And helps them to become less dehydrated, if that's the case.
And then the last thing is we're usually going to give them a deworming. The deworming is not necessarily because we know for sure that they have those worms, but the parasites often complicate things of this disease.
We already have the disease affecting the intestines and oftentimes a lot of the parasites that they have will be parasites of the GI system or of the small intestines affecting those exact same areas.
So, even if we're giving nutrition, we're essentially giving nutrition to the worms, not to the cat. So, we want to give them a dewormer that just kind of covers as much bases as we can so we can try to make sure that that's not going to complicate our problem as well.
And then if everything goes well, fantastic. Our goal is that we want them to be able to go home as soon as possible. So, when they're eating on their own, can take medication from you guys, then that's the ideal time and we want to send them home.
So, let's talk about now, how we're going to prevent spreading the virus, especially before this cat comes home.
One thing we talk about isolating the cats. So, even when they come home, I still recommend they're isolated from the other cats to try to help prevent the spread of the disease to the other cats.
Even though we talked about the fact that there is shedding for only a couple of days. We talked about one, about the environment. The environment can hold it for a year. So, we want to try to make sure that the environment is really clean.
But also, this virus can actually still be in stool and urine for up to six weeks. So, still isolate our infected cat, get rid of anything that the infected cat has touched. I mean, that's the ideal thing. If you can get rid of it, I would just get rid of it.
Get rid of the bedding, the bowls, the litter boxes, the clothes that you put on them, your clothes potentially, if it's hopefully like not something that's your favorite sweatshirt.
But put them in a plastic bag as well and then put them in the trash so that that way we don't have cats that are going through like the dump and getting infected as well. So, put them in a trash bag.
And then anything else you can't get rid of, you don't want to get rid of your favorite sweatshirt, you don't want to get rid of your favorite couch or anything, obviously. So, for those things you can use dilute bleach. It's usually about a 1 to 32 mixture, meaning you put one part of bleach and 32 parts water.
So, if that's one tablespoon of bleach to 32 tablespoons of water, however you want to do that, just 1 to 32 essentially.
It does need to sit on that object for 10 minutes or more at room temperature before you clean that off. So, you can wipe it off and stuff afterwards. But you want to make sure that you've like cleaned everything really well and let it sit for that 10 minutes. That 10-minute time period is essential to try to help make sure it gets killed.
Even then, like this is very difficult to destroy. It is very resistant to things. So, even then, you still may not get everything. Which is why I say, like the other objects that they've touched, if you can throw them away, just get rid of them.
And even better, like ideally, if you can keep the other cats who have not been exposed or have not become sick isolated from even the areas that the other cat was sick, that that would be the best thing.
Like the ideal situation is you bring home a new kitten from somebody from Facebook or something or from Craigslist or something, they get really sick but you've kept them in a bathroom that whole time waiting to see if they're okay and then we just don't let those other cats into the bathroom then.
But that's not always going to happen. Like a lot of times we want our cats to like see each other and play and stuff. So, I do get a lot of the times we're not going to like isolate them and unfortunately, then they're all around the house and then we can potentially infect those other cats.
So, ideally, if you get a kitchen, try to isolate them for a little bit. That least a week time period to make sure that we don't get everybody else sick as well.
And if it everybody is co-mingling, then just carefully monitor the other cats to see if they're showing any symptoms for up to a week afterwards. Because like I said, they can definitely be infected from like just touching noses and stuff or just being in the environment for up to a year afterwards.
So, we just want to monitor them really carefully and make sure that our well cats are not starting to show signs and symptoms because if they are, the faster we get them in, the better the prognosis is going to be.
I will say one of the cool things about this virus though is that once the cat has recovered from the infection, like they are pretty much immune for almost life. So, they've done studies to try to figure out like how long that immunity lasts and they do show that it lasts for quite a long time.
Maybe their whole life, maybe not their whole life, but again, that just depends on like how much of an response to the immune system the body has created to it.
Even though we have that though, like we still talk about like vaccines and like vaccines are going to be the most important thing to try to help prevent this. With those cats that have recovered from it, there's still other things in that vaccine.
The vaccine that we give is called FVRCP, so Feline Viral Rhinotracheitis, Calicivirus and Panleukopenia.
So, the Rhinotracheitis and the Calicivirus are two up respiratory infections and we still want to give the vaccines for that stuff even though we've created a really good immunity for Panleukopenia. That's really good. We still want to give the FVRCP as your veterinarian says that you should.
And they have even shown that the FVRCP vaccine has protected against canine parvo but to a much lesser degree than the feline parvo, which I think is super interesting.
Sometimes kittens will receive some like temporary immunity just through the transfer of antibodies from mom's colostrum. So, that first milk that they produce is called colostrum.
And when the kittens like drink that milk, that colostrum, there are some antibodies in there to help fight against the infection. But they don't last their whole life or very long as well. They usually don't last for longer than 12 weeks.
And we don't know when that goes away. So, sometimes it goes away at six weeks, sometimes it goes away at 12 weeks. We have no idea. There's not really like a good way to test it either that's like a easy way to like test for those things.
And even again, like I said, even though with FVRCP, we're giving panleukopenia or parvovirus vaccine, we also, have those other vaccines that are really helpful as well. So, we still want to do vaccines for them.
Typically, most veterinarians will start out between like six to eight weeks old and then do vaccines every … so, I always learned it was every three to four weeks, but according to a couple of papers, people have done every two to four weeks just depending on like how much exposure that kitten could have to panleukopenia.
But every couple of weeks until they're at least 16 weeks old, and again, even some other articles said at least till they're 20 weeks old. That's all up to the general practice veterinarians member. I am an emergency veterinarian, so that it's not my room.
The other things is that with the adult cats who are vaccinated, you just want to make sure that they're vaccinated according to what your vet suggest because maybe if you did bring in a panleukopenia cat and your cat only gets vaccines every three years, maybe they say, “Well, let's booster that vaccine early just to make sure that we can like build up more of a response to it.”
So, you just have to like kind of talk to your vet about like when to give it, about the risks of it. If your cat has like FeLV and you have a panleukopenia cat in the house, maybe we give it more often because again, we don't want our other cat who already is immunocompromised to get it as well. But talk to them about that, about the risks of it.
And then even fully vaccinated cats, they have had instances where the cat has become exposed to a really high load of virus. Like let's say they've been vaccinated and unfortunately, they go into a shelter. Some situation they have to go under the shelter.
That cat is fully vaccinated, but if that kennel or that humane society has an outbreak of it, they're going to be highly exposed. We're just going to be overwhelming. So, there's no way that the cat can't get that virus.
It's like thinking about if you're standing downhill and there's a rock that comes down, you can like easily move away from that rock. That's the body's immune system moving away from the virus. We don't have to worry about it.
If we are standing downhill and there is an avalanche, you cannot avoid that. No matter how fast you run, that avalanche is going to catch up to you.
So, that's essentially the same thing is that we can't get away from that much of a virus overload and the body will then just kind of shut down. It can't use any more of its white blood cells anymore to try to fight it off. And now, we will get that feline parvovirus.
And then again, with our pregnant cats, we talked about how that they can get feline parvo and affects the kittens. If for some reason people are doing their own vaccines, I know that people do. And if you do though, make sure if you do have just any female cat that's intact, I would not give them the live vaccines.
Usually, we use the inactivated, or most ideally, we use modified live vaccines. They give the most … they like make the immune system work harder and faster than the inactivated ones.
But the live vaccines are more likely to give those kittens, the cerebellar hypoplasia or make them mummified or like we'll have all of those same things happen because you're essentially giving that cat the virus.
So, I do not recommend giving any intact female cat the live virus vaccine because you don't know if they're pregnant or not. Like they go outside or whatever. They get outside for a second, you have no idea. So, just to avoid all of that, don't give them that, give them the modified live vaccine instead.
And you can always ask your veterinarian in case you are worried about that, you just ask them like, “What kind of vaccines do you give? Do you give modified live vaccines?” They're more than happy to answer those questions for you.
Alright. That was a lot of information. We're going to talk about some common questions really quickly.
So, my most common question is somebody asks, “I just adopted this kitten, can the other cats in my house get this panleukopenia?”
And like we talked about, yes, they can potentially get that panleukopenia. So, especially if we've been highly exposed to the virus, we talked about how it lives in the environment for a year so that they can still be really highly exposed to it.
If the other cats are immunocompromised, they have something else that makes their immune system not work as well, then yes, absolutely. That other cats can get it.
My second most common question is, “Can I just do all of these treatments at home?”
So, yes and no. I do not recommend it for our little kittens. I just think that you cannot hydrate them enough to be able to help them and most of the time they're going to suffer and I just don't want that.
So, when we do at home treatment, that means that we're showing you how to give fluids under the skin. You can't give it directly into the IV, you're going to give it under the skin.
But even then, we can only give them so much, like their skin can only stretch so much. And if we do that, they're not getting enough fluids. Even if you do it twice a day, you just cannot give them enough fluids. So, ideally, I usually tell people if it's a kitten, I don't recommend doing it.
If it's an adult cat, we have a better chance of them recovering okay. So, if you do want to try at home treatment, it is something we can try. But if they're not doing well, then we have to start thinking about hospitalizing them if that's the case.
Because they may still need all those other things that we talked about. They might need fresh frozen plasma, they might need integral feeding, which means we're putting that tube in so that we can feed them constantly.
So, like I said, that's a yes or no question. Ideally, they should be hospitalized. If we have no other choice, then yeah, I'm going to show you how to do things at home so that we can try to get them through this.
Giving them the fluids under the skin, giving you antibiotics to give at home, having you syringe feeding them if that's the case, which is always a little bit weary for me because with syringe feed there's also, a higher likelihood that they could potentially aspirate or inhale that food. And then we have a whole other problem.
Now, we have food in the lungs which creates bacteria in the lungs and that's never a good thing. So, we try to like hospitalize them as much as possible, but if not, like I said, we'll do everything we can to try to help show you how to do things at home.
The third most common question I get is, “Can I just take the kitten back to the shelter. Like it's broken, it's not good, I'm just going to drop it off at the shelter.”
Well, when you do that, now, we have this really highly infectious kitten who has now, gone to the shelter and is now, going to affect all the other cats in the shelter.
And now, we have a huge outbreak in panleukopenia for all these cats that could have been adoptable and now, we have a ton of sick cats and who they can't hospitalize all those.
There's no way that the shelter can do that. They can do some treatments for them, but that also, means that a lot of them are going to die. So, I do not recommend that.
I usually tell people like if it comes down to you don't think you can do the treatment at home, this cat is really sick, then I just suggest that we put them to sleep because we don't also want to infect so many other cats. Because that one cat now turns into 50 cats that are now, not able to make it through it.
So, I'd rather not drop them off at the shelter and not have this problem create a huge problem. There are tons of outbreaks of this and some of this can be from those cats that come from feral cat colonies or can be from people who have dropped them off at the shelter.
Like they don't leave a note saying this cat has panleukopenia. They don't know to isolate it. They just know that it doesn't look very good.
But now, we've like that person has touched that cat and then they go and touch another cat and all of those, your clothes and your hands and stuff then become this thing that just helps spread the panleukopenia throughout the whole shelter. So, again, I don't recommend that.
Alright, if you stuck with me till the end here, we're going to talk about a fun animal fact real quick. I talked about lots of other animals. I thought I would talk about birds really quickly.
So, birds, there's a really interesting bird. So, it's this one called Bassian thrush. They're from Australia and they've been known as one of the strangest birds. So, in, I think it was the ‘50s, if I remember correctly, like somebody had noticed that these birds, it looked like they would fart on the ground.
So, they would hear the sound and they would see the bird like drop down and air puff up on the ground.
And when they would like do this thing that looked like farting, they would turn around really quickly and look to see if there was a worm because the worm would be really startled by the noise and the puff of air. And then it would like wiggle around and then this bird could find these worms. Really interesting adaptation.
But then later on, they wouldn't checked to see like, “Well, can birds actually fart? Can they produce this gas?” So, their anatomy is not quite the same as ours. They have something called cloaca, a vent.
So, basically all of their urine and their stool goes into one compartment and then comes out one hole called the vent or the cloaca.
And they found that yes, like they could potentially do it, but there's just not really like a good reason for them to do it. When you notice, like if anybody has chickens and stuff, or you see birds, they're eating constantly. Their digestive system goes very quickly.
So, they're eating something and within a couple of hours, they’re like basically pooping it out. There's not enough time for bacteria to build up in there to be able to make gas and then create this like farting sound.
So, then some researchers went back and they're like, “Well, can birds really fart? Like can this Bassian thrush actually do this?” So, they went and studied them and tried to figure out like what exactly are they doing?
They found that they're doing something called like vent dipping. So, the first researchers, they saw that the bird would like squat down and then a puff of air. So, what the new researchers found was that when they would squat down, they would like tremor their tail feathers and it would create this like wave of air.
And then they tried to listen for the sounds of this and they said that it sounds like they're like inhaling air really quickly, like gulping air basically.
And that's creating this like sound that's disturbing the worms. And then that the tail feathers are then creating this wind that's making the worms scared as well. And so, they flip around really quickly and then grab the worms.
Now, these birds are also, really hard to study because they were hard to find. So, do these birds actually fart? I don't know. Could be. Who knows? Like they can't get really get close enough to them to like figure this out.
They do know that they don't do this at any other time. So, when they're sitting on their nests, when they're flying and stuff, they have not found that they make this sound at all. So, we know that it's really done just for the hunting purposes. Super interesting little birds.
Alright guys, if you have any questions for me, please like always email me. I'm happy to answer them for you. If you have any suggestions on podcasts you want to do, any topics, I'm all for it.
And you can find me pretty much on any platform at Vetsplanation or Vetsplanation Podcast and online on my website, vetsplanationpodcast.com. Thanks guys.
Thanks for listening this week. If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or you just want to say hi, feel free to email me at suggs@vetsplanationpodcast.com.
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Thank you all again for listening and we'll see you back here next week.