A Thai woman, Thammapa Supamas, living in Thailand wanted to home treat her all-white cat for a fungal infection on his/her right foreleg. She decided upon a treatment that is used for people: a turmeric body scrub which she had researched would successfully treat her cat’s infection. Incidentally, I note that you can buy turmeric for cats as a dietary supplement. It’s meant to do all kinds of things including improving the cat’s immune system, reducing the risk of blood clotting and lowering bad cholesterol. It is also stated to be an antifungal and an antibacterial.
Anyway, you can see what happened in the three photographs on this page. They are from Facebook and therefore they are not copyright protected. They’ve caused quite a stir on the Internet as they would because it is not often that you see a bright yellow cat. We don’t know whether he diagnosis was correct but the turmeric seems to have cured her cat.
My first concern was whether turmeric all over a cat’s body was toxic to the cat but it isn’t as far as I can tell. We don’t know what happened next but no doubt the cat will ingest some of it and after a while it will fade away once the cat has groomed herself enough times. Perhaps the lady will give her attractive cat a bath which may help to remove it. It would still concern me that it is safe on the cat’s fur as this product was not designed to be ingested as far as I can tell.
I do wonder why it is all over her body. She must have thought that although the fungal infection was on one leg it was likely to spread to other parts of her cat’s body and so she was taking proactive steps to prevent that happening.
Turmeric contains a substance called curcumin which is an antioxidant and which is thought to have anti-inflammatory properties. Turmeric scrubs can be applied to people. They say that turmeric powder soothes a person’s skin. You wet your skin with warm water and apply the turmeric sugar body scrub and rub it into the skin in a circular motion. You then rinse off with warm water and gently dry the area. I suppose that this lady got her idea from this sort of advice on the Internet.
