More Information about Feline Leukemia
It was well known that if you had a group of cats, such as was common practice around barns for rodent control, that every few years or so, a bunch of the cats would act sickly in one way or another and die off. Most farmers shrugged it off as nature in action: natural population control.
That a virus was responsible for knocking out the immune system of cats, which in turn led to things like pneumonia, cancers (lymphomas), and bone marrow diseases like leukemia was discovered in 1965.
FeLV is transmitted through intimate contact with an infected cat. The most common portal of entry for infection is the mouth and nasal cavities. If your otherwise healthy cat is exposed to an infected cat one time, there is about a 10% chance your cat will get the disease. But, of course, if your cat is exposed multiple times, the risk becomes much greater.
This disease is not nearly the problem it used to be ... at least for well cared for pets, because a vaccine was invented and over the years refined and improved. There is quite a bit of controversy about how frequently we need to give the vaccine and whether or not it's potential side effects are excessively dangerous, but I can tell you this: I rarely ever see bad side effects from this vaccine (it's all the rage for article writers to claim that sarcomas (a terrible cancer) are common and caused by vaccines; but I've seen hundreds of cats die miserably from leukemia.
A lot of cats carry the leukemia virus but live a fairly normal life, but
once the virus multiplies into fullblown disease, there is no cure.
Treatment consists of supportive care...making the patient comfortable, treating symptoms such as no appetite, etc...and fighting secondary problems like infection, pneumonia, and malnutrition. With luck, sometimes we can get the disease to go into remission.
Experimental treatments abound. Immune stimulation. Medicines being used to treat human AIDS are frequently used with various degrees of success. Sometimes the University Vet Schools will treat your leukemia positive pets in trial treatment programs. And with a little luck, soon there will be a treatment that isn't too dangerous or expensive available.
Meanwhile, please get your kittens and cats vaccinated with one of the newer and better (and safer) vaccines.
