A Michael Broad Blog
I think it is always useful for people who are new to cat caregiving to quickly check over what is meant by an infectious disease. When domestic cats get ill it is most likely to be because of a bacterial and/or viral infection. Perhaps the most common is the URI – upper respiratory infection …
Let’s compare viral and bacterial diseases affecting domestic cats. Here’s a concise table highlighting the key differences. The sources are many veterinary websites and other authoritative websites (see base of page). Sorry but you’ll have to turn your smartphones horizontally to see the 2nd and 3rd tables width-wise. This is a coding issue and …
This may surprise readers. I didn’t know until I read a study published in 2000 (things may have changed since) on the topic and compared the figures to those provided by Battersea Dogs & Cats Home. The study tells us how commonplace FIV infections are in cats in Istanbul. And there appears to be …
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 …
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 …
If you ask Google to find answers to the question in the title it finds websites owned by commercial enterprises with an interest in selling colloidal silver. Not good, right? These sites recommend colloidal silver as a general cure-all treatment both internally and externally for cats. And dogs. The tone of the articles is …
I’m going to be slightly provocative. But I think cat caregivers should sometimes, gently and politely, challenge their veterinarian. And there’s one particular treatment where this attitude may be important. It is the prescription of antibiotics. I think it is probably known that veterinarians tend to prescribe antibiotics as a precaution. They don’t know …
No, antibiotics will not help genuine cat flu because this infectious disease is caused by a virus and antibiotics are prescribed to cure bacterial infections not viral infections. However, often a viral infection can lead to a secondary bacterial infection which is why veterinarians sometimes prescribe antibiotics if they see a patient with cat …
