Kitten Stuffy Nose

Blood Suckers: How To Protect Your Pet, Part 3

There are many organisms in the environment that can affect our pets, often in more ways than one. Among them are external and internal parasites. These can be found in many areas, and the severity of disease they cause varies from pet to pet and organism to organism. While keeping your pets completely safe from these problems is not really possible, there are ways to try to help prevent, reduce severity, and treat your pet if they do become affected.

Some of the most common problems are caused by those organisms we will call 'blood suckers.' The name is quite telling, as all of these following organisms do indeed suck blood, which can sometimes lead to serious blood loss. However, some also carry and transmit other organisms, which then lead to other, sometimes even more serious problems. In the next few articles, we will focus on these little blood suckers, including fleas, ticks, mosquitoes, and hookworms.

MOSQUITOES (and Heartworm Disease):

A well known nuisance to humans and our pets, these fly-like insects love to dive in and steal blood. Most commonly a bother during the warm months, these blood suckers love wet, stagnant, marshy areas. Although outdoor pets are most affected, mosquitoes do travel indoors and can find your pet there, too.

The mosquito's bite is annoying, and they do feed on blood, but the amount of blood loss they cause never seems to be a major problem. Mosquitoes are mostly a problem because they can carry and transmit organisms that do cause major disease.

Mosquitoes can carry and transmit the organism responsible for heartworm disease. Not very common in this area (but still possible), mosquitoes that carry the heartworm larvae transfer the larvae to your pet during blood sucking. The larvae travel in your pet's bloodstream, developing over six months into adult heartworms that live in the large blood vessels just outside the right side of the heart. After mating, the female adult produces offspring called microfilaria, which are then picked up by another feeding mosquito, continuing the life cycle as these microfilaria turn into larvae in the mosquito.

Often times, there are no signs of heartworm disease until later in the course of illness. Dogs appear to be more commonly affected than cats but that may be because it is more difficult to diagnose/detect in cats. In dogs, the adult worms cause the most problems, damaging the blood vessels that supply the lungs, thereby also eventually damaging the lungs.

Mycoplasma in Cats

I'd never heard of Mycoplasma in cats until a reader wrote in about this article and suggested mycoplasma as a cause of death (see: Help Sudden Kitten Death ). So I decided to do a little research on the subject. I'll be learning about this illness as I write today's story.

Mycoplasma are single cell organisms similar to bacteria, and are the smallest free-living, self-replicating organisms known. Unlike bacteria that have a rigid cell wall, Mycoplasma have thin, flexible membranes, which contain its cytoplasma. This lack of a cell wall allows Mycoplasma to resist many of the antibiotics that are useful against most bacteria. Mycoplasma are difficult to detect in human and animal specimens and difficult to culture in the laboratory (source: http://allanimaleyeclinic.com).

Mycoplasma until recently has been referred to as feline infectious anemia ( see another article that refers to this condition ). This is a term I'm VERY familiar with as one of the kittens I was supposed to rescue at GCAC in Greenville, SC died of the illness. This occurred over the same weekend Lilo and Stitch were in critical condition. Lilo and Stitch made it through than weekend. A gold tabby kitten named Froggie did not. Hemobartonella felis , the official term, was first discovered in 1942 in Africa.

This is a very scary illness in that it mimics other viral and bacterial infections. Feline conjunctivitis ( cat pink eye ), coughing, sneezing and trouble urinating are just a few of the symptoms. This disease is scary because it’s very hard to diagnose. The mycoplasma organism will attach itself to a host (usually caused by a flea bite) and sit there outside the cells waiting for a cat’s immune system to react. Once the immune system detects foreign proteins on the red blood cells it begins an attack using the cats antibodies to destroy the red blood cells. It’s a difficult organism to culture because it requires a live host to thrive.

An infected cat may eat cat litter in an attempt to replace iron lost to the organism.

Mycoplasma species are part of the internal flora of the eye and also the upper respiratory tract of a cat and has been shown to be a major cause of these conditions.

Most cat blood sent for lab work is visually scanned for the organism, but a cat infected may still not be diagnosed due to, how should I put this, sneakiness of the organism.

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