A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading
sciencenews.org
sciencenews.org
I really hope cordyceps is one of the last to do this step.
> there are many fungal infections that occur more frequently in tropical zones or are restricted to certain regions within the tropics [0]
I worry that one of the large variety of fungal species not resistant to high temperature will evolve to be resistant and cause great harm to our society. Similar to the way animal spillover events, like covid-19, are so devastating. A novel pathogen introduced to a naive population.
Do yourself a favor, crush the pill and put it in food. Problem solved. Difficult with multiple cats but I had two and one needed medication so I put this little guys on a window sill he loved to perch on which the other cat didn't care to reach.
Depends on the coating - some coatings only dissolve once they are out of the strongly acidic stomach. Slow dissolution is used in retarded medication, which may or may not be coincident with targeting post-stomach delivery.
So the only way I can give it to him (without drama) is by putting it deep into his mouth so he never tastes it and immediately swallows it.
From a quick search, it looks like cerenia is available in this form.
Your last sentence, "[pilling cat] (without drama) is by putting it deep into his mouth" must mean you have a very chill cat [emphasis mine].
I bought it off of Chewy, but there are other places that compound it into a transdermal as well.
> Your last sentence, "[pilling cat] (without drama) is by putting it deep into his mouth" must mean you have a very chill cat [emphasis mine].
I'm not the person you are replying to, but for my cat putting any pills deep into her mouth meant using a piller device. Luckily my cat was totally non-aggressive, so when it came time to take pills she would try to evade, but never attack, but she was pretty good at undulating her tongue to try to swat pills out.
Over her last year or so she was getting multiple medications per day (and subcutaneous fluids 3x a week) so being able to do some of them as transdermals helped lessen the stress of getting everything into her.
> Can confirm, transdermal maropitant (cerenia) worked very well for my cat who was dealing with both CKD and IBD in her later years (she passed away in December).
Thank you both for the tip! I'm going to look in to that.
Sorry to hear your cat passed away :(
> Luckily my cat was totally non-aggressive, so when it came time to take pills she would try to evade, but never attack, but she was pretty good at undulating her tongue to try to swat pills out.
Exact same thing here. The cat is totally relaxed, no biting, clawing, etc. Only tries to "go in reverse". Which doesn't help him, since I'm sitting behind him. But he has gotten good at trying to swat pills out of his mouth with his tongue. But with a piller, it is do-able.
Thanks.
She made it to ~18 (just over 16 years with me and she was estimated to be about 2 by the shelter I adopted her from, but they weren't exactly sure) despite the various health issues, so it wasn't a big shock when she passed away but its still awful to lose them. Be good to your guy while you still can.
The one other thing that helped with my cat for some medications is, where possible, stuffing the pill into a gel cap (you can buy bags of like hundreds of caps pretty inexpensively) that's just big enough to fit the pill. This increases the size a bit, of course, but for any particularly bitter medication it at least masks the mouth taste.
They even have some vet-specific gel caps made to taste like chicken, etc. Those never worked any better than non-flavored ones for my cat, though anecdotally I guess they do work for some cats enough that they will voluntarily eat the pill.
I recommend everyone who has healthy cats to talk to their vet about administering empty capsules. Just so you and the cat get comfortable with the process before you need it.
Kind of like you need to train them from an early age that clipping their nails is fine.
When your cat gets old, they will need to take oral supplements, at the very least. You’re the person they trust the most to give them.
> You’re the person they trust the most
-_- Gave my spry lil five year old critter a hug. He doesn't deserve to get old.
We ought to have learned after the Covid “herd immunity” policies that killed hundreds of thousands around the world, that infectious disease control should be grounded on actual research, and not on simplified world models.
Researchers currently recommend treatment.
My point is, take this uninformed opinion that goes against the researchers’ recommendation for what it is: wrong.
By whom?
> mass use of antibiotics in industrial farming
This is a completely different issue. No one's doing mass prophylactic treatment against this fungus, and even if we treated every single cat in the world, there are 60 times more chickens. Industrial farming is on a completely different scale.
> doctors and vets
Unless they're citing research supporting their opinion, it's as irrelevant as any other non-specialist.
Although, it needs to be balanced against other options. I’m sure this list isn’t exhaustive but we have:
* Medicine
* Uncontrolled spread
* Somehow modify the animals’ behavior to spread illnesses less
* Wipe out infected animals
2 and 4 seem less than desirable. 3… I mean “herding cats” is an expression for a reason, right? They are not very obedient in general.
Is there a good option I missed?
Flavored pill compounding is apparently also an option, but I've never tried it.
This does not work on compounds sensitive to stomach acids. Some medications (both veterinarian and human) have to be specially coated to survive this environment [1], if you crush the pills the medication gets less effective, completely ineffective or, like ibuprofen, irritate the stomach. Or, worst case, the medication is designed for retarded release in the stomach acid - and now that you've crushed it, the entirety of the compound is dissolved in the stomach at once.
Please always ask your veterinarian/physician, the pharmacy staff and always read the medication's application notes because particularly physicians often are unaware and the same ingredient on the prescription might be fulfilled by a crushable or a non-crushable variant which only the pharmacist knows.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magensaftresistente_Tablette
Your conclusion is based on your misunderstanding: perhaps take more care in future, and be especially careful if sharing your misinformation.
After absorption into the bloodstream, ibuprofen indirectly reduces the prostaglandins that normally protect the stomach lining
crushing ibuprofen can make local irritation more intense and quicker, but this is usually not the main driver of ulcers
Taking too much vitamin C [acidic] can cause side effects, including: Upset stomach, vomiting and loose stools. Heartburn. Stomach cramps or bloating.
I mean what you've said is interesting (albeit irrelevant to ibuprofen given the pathway).
PROTIP never ever do this. The cat might just decide food is not worth having and develop liver and stomach issues. Bastards won't tell you anything is wrong, then they'll just crawl into a hole, as usual.
Source: I had the same not-good, very very bad idea and almost killed mine once. Had to go for a feeding tube and all. If you must give you cat medicine in pill form, just use one of those silicone pill "siringes" with flexible tips (and give it some Churu or similar to train it to tolerate medicine better). Washable, no fuss, quick and easy.
My wife's family's countryside ex-farm has a barn, and out in the barn we found... a mummified cat. By mummified I mean, desiccated, hairless, but much more than a mere skeleton.
Damnedest thing.
In my experience, the best way to give cats pills is a pill pocket, e.g. from Greenies [1]. The pocket is a hollow, soft cat treat. You put the pill inside the pocket, close it, and feed it to the cat. With some larger pills, you may have to split them up (if the medication allows). Some cats don't love the flavor, but you can use a sauce packet and coat it with some sauce.
Brasil must have something like between 40 and 50 million cats (including strays). An infectious disease that killed thousands (what the article means? 1000, 2000? 10000?) while not ignorable, it is not exactly highly prevalent.
Porto Alegre metropolitan area is having a huge outbreak. My girlfriend is a vet and has been dealing with new cases multiple times a week.
Many of our friends also got it (it is very hard to not get scratched when handling with cats in pain).
It is a really really shitty, painful and hard to treat disease, requiring multiple months of treatment. It is very painful but usually not letal for humans and cats that are in the earlier stages and get treatment.
However it is absolutely lethal for populations of wild and stray cats, as it is very infectious and 100% lethal unassisted.
A further issue still is that some fungi exhibit extreme resistance to sterilization; one of the nosocomial emerging fungal pathogens of concern, for example, can easily survive the peroxide fogging technique often used to clean high-risk hospital rooms even at several times the standard exposure duration and concentrations.
Additional issues include treatment compliance - clearing fungal infections can require taking the drug for months without missing a dose.
We should be very concerned about emerging pathogens in light of anthropogenic climate change, but with proper funding and attention this is not necessarily apocalyptic.
Sporotrichosis affects otherwise healthy individuals, often those working in agriculture or with plants or plant materials, such as packing straw or thatching. It also affects individuals exposed to the fungus during leisure outdoor activities associated with skin abrasions. Contact with domestic or feral cats, particularly among veterinarians and others looking after cats, may also lead to infection in some regions."
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/sporotricho...
Still, it is more concerning for cats than humans.
HOCl is the best non-toxic broad spectrum human compatible antimicrobial. I have been using it in many household applications since COVID started.
It can be prepared by electrolysis of acidified (e.g. vinegar, but ideally pH 5.5, and inorganic acids make it last way longer at that pH, but they are more dangerous to handle) salt water (high margin of safety) or alternatively prepared by mixing highly diluted bleach with an diluted acid (low margin of safety) to target 20-2000 ppm depending on your delivery method (e.g. one tablespoon of bleach and vinegar into a gallon of water). If you are worried about the safety of this approach, note that far, far less chlorine gas is emitted when made this way than by ordinary bathroom cleaning with a bleach-based bathroom cleaner.
The smell of HOCl is unique and completely different from chlorine gas. The small amount of chlorine gas emitted likes to sit on top of the surface of the water, but if this layer is blown away, the distinct smell of HOCl becomes apparent immediately. It smells like minty bubblegum or something more familiar: a swimming pool.
The good news is when making HOCl for disinfection purposes 20-2000 ppm, only very small quantities of chlorine gas are evolved. They can be reduced further by shaking the closed container used to make it, further dissolving the gas into solution to make more HOCl.
I run this solution in my humidifier at low concentrations to prevent microorganisms from growing in it. I also use the electrolysis method to accurately make very low concentrations for nasal rinses. Typically, 15-30 seconds from a $10 USB electrolyzer in salt water.
Looking even a little deeper (Wikipedia) confirms that chlorine chemistry, especially when combined with electrolysis, is very complex, and it's hard to know if you're making the right thing. FWIW every sensible electrolysis-based DIY project has dire warnings about electrolysing solutions of common salt.
In this case, it's not complicated
This is just terrible advice.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_Us_(TV_series)
If you find this topic interesting, I recommend the book “Parasite Rex”
and
"Any kind of pandemic is scary by the sheer magnitude of its reach, but one that would affect the brain? That would be another level of scary."
"Affections"? Are you talking about socialism or Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) perhaps?
I'll keep this in mind, thank you.
As for your question, I have little to do with USA politics, which includes holding little to no attitude towards POTUS, and I very much hope for situation to stay that way. Prudence compels me to refrain from saying anything more on the subject.
https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/232933/affection-vs-...
UPD: reading your other comments confirms TDS.. I'm sorry.
There are some precedents for this: hibernating bats lower their body temperature to that of a moldy environment, and are getting infected with a fungus which kills 90% of them in some cases [2]. Logic goes that raising the ambient temperature could be the same (with some evolution thrown in) as lowering our body temperature.
Is it credible? No idea, not that kind of scientist.
That’s a little horrifying.
It includes instructions for the general population and for medical professionals, as well as a couple of technical reports with tons of references to recent studies.
No! We must stop this at all costs
>and people
Eh, all right then. If it takes the cats out at least we'd be going with them
Without them we will have even more insects.
So this time cats won’t protect us from diseases by killing the carrier, these time they help the carriers
Driving in the eighties with windscreens full of insects, and now hardly anything, and a lot less of the things that lived on them.
If we use a more modern care would the increased aerodynamics prevent impacts as instead of punching through the air you are cutting through it?
Have never read the full experimental setup and assumptions... I do know that I have less dead bug then when I was a kid...
Just not housecats.
There are people that either simply do not understand the natural order that the majority of humans want to eat meat and keep pets, or they do not care about other people enough to respect their lifestyle choices.
Doesn't matter if humans thing they're cute, tasty, or necessary. We literally enslave other living beings in order to feel good about ourselves.
Pets are emotional slaves. People keep them because of the emotional value they provide to their lifestyles.
This kind of hyper-scary overreaction from the CDC official being quoted and other government agents is a big cause of the current loss of trust in those institutions.
A few years ago monkeypox was gonna kill all of us and our dogs, I get “extreme heat” and “severe weather” warnings for days where the weather is 20* below the annual peak in my home town, and now a fungus is going to kill me and my cats.
Ok boomer - just stop worrying please?
From what I can tell, deaths are in the dozens (over 30 years).
I’m worried about the cats, though.
> “What we have right now is this ginormous ongoing outbreak of Sporothrix brasiliensis in Brazil,” Lockhart, a senior adviser at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
I also find it hard to take an article seriously when its volume comparison employs "Olympic-sized swimming pools". I think the fraction of people who have a clear enough mental idea of the dimensions or volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool is pretty small relative to the articles readership, which I hope they measure realistically under the assumption that the number of readers will always be close to half the number of eyeballs on the page. Otherwise they would be inflating readership and that would be misleading.
At least in the US, "Olympic sized swimming pool" is as common a unit of measure as a US football field - very commonly used.
I think it is a bit comical to use swimming pools as a volumetric reference when most people's experience with swimming pools has been in a back yard setting or on visits to community pools, which may be any convenient size.
A lot of US high schools and US colleges have Olympic pools.
Especially for high schools it's also true that a lot of them don't. In the case of high schools I think an Olympic sized swimming pool is likely in mid to large cities or there may be one available locally. Swim teams at high school level are probably city school features instead of rural school features. I think there are more rural high schools than city high schools.
I don't know though.
Colleges. Hmmm. I suspect that all state colleges have pools. I am not sure about smaller colleges though. That's an interesting question. I'm sure the data is out there though.
Also, what is that babble about "the planet's ecosystem" being better off by eliminating humans? If you really want to see it as a whole - the Gaia hypothesis - then humans are part of it just like flies and ticks and mosquitos and birds and whales. All play a role, some spread diseases to others while they feed yet again others. Removing humans from the equation is just like Mao's decision to get rid of the sparrows which ate some of the harvest in that the balance will shift until a new equilibrium has been reached. In Mao's case it killed tens of millions of humans, removing humans will result in the death of hundreds of millions of other species.
We are part of the ecosystem no matter how much you try to deny it. The planet will abide, humans most likely as well. If you want to call for fewer humans on the planet - something which seems to be the future anyway since births are rapidly declining almost everywhere - that's fine but realise you're just following others like Malthus who did so before. Malthus was proven wrong many times over, you will be proven wrong as well since if there's one thing humans are good at it is adapting to a changing environment. If it gets colder humans adapt, that's how we made it through the series of glaciations. If it gets warmer humans adapt, that's how we made it through e.g. the Roman and Viking age warm periods.
The entire South American primate and caviomorph rodent lineages (everything from capuchins to capybaras) descend from African ancestors that rafted across the Atlantic on vegetation mats roughly 40 million years ago.
When the Isthmus of Panama closed (~3 million years ago), North American placental mammals poured south and drove a large fraction of South America's endemic fauna—native ungulates, many marsupial lineages—to extinction.
Yeah. Some species get crowded out, maybe we should avoid that in a lot of cases, but is not the capital sin western people have been brainwashed to believe it when they replaced their christianism with new age Gaia worship. Species get extinct, eco-systems change, sometimes it is worth preventing that, in other, who fucking cares?
The big deal is that when a species becomes invasive, the effects can cascade. You don't just lose their direct competitors and their prey, you can lose anything they pollinate, nest in, are nested in, etc. You can replace a diverse ecosystem with a near-monoculture.
Of course, if you don't hold the fundamental belief that biodiversity is Good, and is Better than raw biomass increase, I see why this doesn't bother you, but I do hold that position.
These are opinions and I understand not everyone has these same beliefs.
Dogs are even worse. Make them shit in your own backyard please.
If you are a city dweller please do not keep “pets”, it’s bloody ridiculous, thank you.
Domestication of animals might be the single greatest achievement of humans.
Thinks have been spreading for quite a while. Migratory species are older than ourselves. Jet stream can carry spores over oceans. World commerce is older than you think. Wars and migratory movements has always been a part of our civilization.
I'm aware that trade networks long precede recorded history, and potentially precede fully-modern humans. The fact that you can have homsapien admixture (eg: homo sapiens + denisovans) far, far outside of Africa is proof enough for that.
The time scales did use to be different, and speeding things up as much as possible does not seem to be a good thing.