More challenges...

A few posts back I vented a little bit of frustration about the challenges of feline heart disease. I just finished reading up on some of the latest regarding feline HEARTWORM disease. The more we find out about it, the scarier it gets - our cats NEED to be using heartworm prevention (mine have been all their life). Here's a link to a great website that discusses it in further detail:

http://www.vin.com/WebLink.plx?URL=http://www.knowheartworms.org/nelson.asp

I send you to this page of the website because I want you to get to know one of the vets who has been instrumental in increasing awareness. Just in case you don't have it in you to visit that page, here's something that he wrote recently that really should get your attention:

"In 1997 I was...in my 18th year of practice along the upper Texas gulf coast where heartworm disease (HWD) was, and still is, a major problem in DOGS. My practice administered adulticidal therapy to 4 to 6 dogs and diagnosed about twice that many every WEEK. That's a lot of heartworms (HW) but we rarely diagnosed HWs in a cat. That year, Feline Heartgard was introduced and clients were asking me if they needed to put their cats on HW preventive. My response was NO, it was rare, a freak of nature issue and we only diagnosed a cat with HWs every once in a Blue Moon. Having said that, I did a literature search on the incidence of HW in cats and found very little information. So I arranged with our local shelters to have the euthanized stray cats delivered to my practice for necropsy. My intent was to prove a certain pharmaceutical company wrong. I was going to prove that feline HWD was indeed a rare disease. The first week I necropsied 8 cats or I should say my technician necropsied 8 cats. We found adult HWs in THREE. That certainly got my attention. To make a long story short, we necropsied 259 cats over a one year period, tested them for FeLV, FIV and HW antibodies. We found adult worms in 25 cats (9.67%), antibodies in 26% of all cats tested, and that there was no correlation between the FeLV/FIV status and HW infections."

Heartworm disease is out there, and you're cat is at risk, EVEN if you cat never goes outside. All it takes is one mosquito bite, and according to the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine, somewhere around 25 to 33% of the cats they see with heartworm disease are indoor only cats. Mosquitoes are responsible for transmission and can get inside your house. Over the next few months, you are likely to start seeing television commercials about a new cat product that protects against heartworm disease. My hope is that it will further raise awareness to help to save lives and reduce disease.