A Michael Broad Blog
There is an article in the online news media today (24th August 2024) about a female mountain lion in Colorado, USA, which was seen staggering around with paralysed hind legs. The journalist said that the cat suffered from “staggering disease”. That’s a generic term which doesn’t specify the virus causing it. But in this …
Roughly twice as many viruses pass from humans to animals than from animals to people (findings of a recent study – see below for summary) Surprisingly, we find that humans are as much a source as a sink for viral spillover events, insofar as we infer more viral host jumps from humans to other …
You may remember reports from Cyprus a little while ago about 300,000 cats on that island being killed by a new strain of feline coronavirus called FCoV-23. The numbers were exaggerated but they think about 8000 have died although there are about 1 million strain domestic cats on Cyprus, more than the entire human …
Kittens are susceptible to various disorders, from digestive ailments to the deadly feline herpesvirus. People should familiarise themselves with the following symptoms as they may indicate something is wrong with a young cat. Many kittens suffer from roundworms; tapeworms and hookworms are also common internal parasites (endoparasites) in kittens and cats. Diarrhoea is one …
The news today is that surplus stocks of “unused coronavirus medication for humans will be made available to treat cats in Cyprus” (The Guardian) suffering from the mass outbreak of FIP (a different species of coronavirus). News media covered the story extensively and while doing so grossly exaggerated the deaths in stating that 300,000 had …
In answer to the question in the title, the chances are very slim, as I see it, but please read on. A lot is currently been spoken about the “deadly cat coronavirus” in Cyprus which has ostensibly killed 300,000 cats but which I have said is an impossible statistic [link to that article]. The …
Feline morbillivirus (FeMV) was, I’m told, first reported in Hong Kong and mainland China in 2012. It has been associated with kidney inflammation (nephritis). It can infect domestic and wild cats. A study in 2016 published on the National Library of Medicine in the USA, concluded that the association between morbillivirus and chronic kidney …
As feline viruses can be confusing to the average cat caretaker and I put myself in that category, I thought an overview page might help. The intention is to stand back and try and make sense of all the long words and slightly confusing names such as “feline distemper”, a misleading description. This is …
