When the panleukopenia virus invaded the Jersey Shore Animal Center last summer, Vanessa Beach and her coworkers spent a nightmarish month scrubbing, disinfecting, observing, isolating, and euthanizing. And despite dire mortality predictions for kittens infected with the virus, Animal Center employees also spent that month administering fluids and antibiotics. Although they euthanized close to 40 animals who had been infected or exposed, they were emotionally unable to let go of 10 of the stray kittens they had cared for and fallen in love with before the outbreak. "There was just no way we could euthanize them," says Beach, the office manager for the New Jersey shelter. Staff placed the most severely ill kitten under the direct supervision of a local veterinarian, but they cared for the rest of the animals at the shelter, working with vets to provide fluids and antibiotics. After the kittens had been healthy for a month, they started receiving their vaccination series and were kept in isolation for another six weeks; surprisingly, all the animals pulled through in good shape. That was an unusual case; treatment of panleukopenia is not easy. Depending on the severity of the case, a kitten may even need blood transfusions to help replace lost white blood cells. "[Shelters] are going to have to make that decision as to what to do with the cats that are sick, bearing in mind that some of them are going to survive with appropriate therapy," says James Richards, DVM, director of the Cornell Feline Health Center at Cornell University. "Sometimes it has to be very aggressive." In many shelter settings, especially those with high numbers of cats and limited funding sources, treatment is close to impossible. "Panleuk is a treatable disease," says Lou Garber, former director of clinical medicine and kennel operations for the Animal Rescue League of Western Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh. "If you have the money and funding available, you could do IV therapy ...along with IV antibiotics and the whole deal. But in a nonprofit shelter situation, it would cost you tens of thousands of dollars to treat these animals, and it just wasn't feasible [in our case]." Even more important than the potential financial cost of treatment is the cost in terms of animal suffering. In trying to determine what's best for the animals, many believe that in severe cases, treatment may not be the most humane alternative.  | | Treating panleukopenia in the shelter can be very difficult on cats and risks further transmission of the virus. Even veterinarians in private practice cannot cure the disease; they can provide only supportive therapy while the virus runs its course—in the form of antibiotics, fluids, and sometimes even blood transfusions. |
And there's no guarantee that a cat will pull through: the fatality rate in a panleukopenia outbreak can vary anywhere from 25 to 75 percent, according to the Cornell Feline Health Center. Supportive therapy can help prevent the risk of secondary infections that result from a kitten's weakened immunity, but nothing can be done to attack the virus itself. Veterinarians and other caretakers must wait it out, supporting the cat's systems in other ways while letting the virus run its natural course. When a staffer at the Franklin County Animal Shelter in Farmington, Maine, became attached to a kitten with panleukopenia, Manager Andrea Bergman, DVM, agreed to treat the cat. "Normally I wouldn't try to treat it. I think it's unfair to the animal to make it go that long with supportive care if I feel very certain that it's panleukopenia," Bergman says. "In private practice, if I had access to a 24-hour facility, if the owner wanted to try treating it, [I] would try, because there are some successes—but with a very grave prognosis. It's such a personal choice. It's kind of like saying to somebody, 'Do you want to pursue cancer treatment?' " Despite the low chances, Bergman tried in the shelter anyway, going home in the evenings and coming back again at night to administer more fluids and more antibiotics. But in the end, the kitten died after five days of intensive care. Even when kittens survive panleukopenia, it's not always for the better. Those who are infected in utero—or while they are still in their mothers' wombs—may be born with damage to their central nervous systems. The virus can attack the kittens' cerebella during the late stages of a pregnancy or even after birth. "They can be just very uncoordinated—some of them to the extent that they just don't make suitable pets—unless the signs aren't too severe and we have a fairly patient owner," says Richards. "[In those cases], they can make suitable pets." Infected kittens may either die suddenly or survive the disease and begin showing signs of a lack of coordination when they start walking at about two weeks of age. This condition, called "ataxia," manifests itself in rolling or tumbling as the cat tries to walk, involuntary head-twitching, or swaying of the body. "If they are coordinated enough to obtain food, the kittens will survive," Richards and a colleague wrote in The Cornell Book of Cats. "However, the ataxia will persist through life with little, if any, improvement or compensation as they grow older." Ataxia can take much milder forms as well, as with one of the kittens who survived treatment at the Jersey Shore Animal Shelter. "He was only about five weeks old [when he had panleukopenia], and [now] he just walks a little funny," says Beach. "He's just a little loosey-goosey in the rear end. But the rest of him, really, you would never know."
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