if your cat has FIV, here's what you need to know

Hey friends, welcome back to the channel. My name is May, I'm a vet and today I want to talk about feline immunodeficiency virus, FIV, because our boy Keith here is FIV positive. And let's see if you can see him. I love you, bye. I will let you just sit in the background. Essentially, Keith was a rescue that came to the hospital covered in lots of cat bite abscesses and wounds. So he was a stray that was probably roaming the streets and got into a lot of fights with other tomcats. As a result of his multiple bites, he tested positive for FIV, which means he has the virus, FIV virus. And however I want to stress, it is not a death sentence. As you can see, Keith is very happy and he's thriving. And he also had another disease called FIP, which I will make another video about. But today we'll talk about what FIV is and if your cat has it, what it means for you. And hopefully spread the word that it is not a death sentence, and it really depends on the case and the strain of virus in your cat. As you can already guess, FIV is transmitted through cat bites, saliva, and it can also spread in other sort of body fluids. In brief, FIV basically means that your cat has a virus in their system that can affect the immune system. And unfortunately it is lifelong. However, it is not a death sentence and it depends on how healthy your cat is. Your cat may just need more regular checkups compared to like a normal cat. And they have to stay indoors because we want to limit the spread of FIV infection into the wider cat population. So sometimes people also refer it to the cat HIV virus because it shows similar characteristics. However, they're also very different and we'll just explain a little bit. So initially when your cat has the infection, so when Keith got the infection, he had like an acute viremia, so like acute viral infection, which basically is presented as fever, lethargy, as the virus spreads into the lymph nodes and goes to your lymphocytes and your T cells, your macrophages, and it spreads throughout the So after this acute phase, the virus then enters an asymptomatic phase where it is very variable. We don't know how long, it depends on each cat, we don't know how long this cat will stay in the asymptomatic phase where basically the virus is spreading slowly in the system but they don't show any outward signs so they're asymptomatic. They may have some abnormalities on their blood tests but no sort of like outward signs. And unfortunately if after this asymptomatic phase they progress further, then your T cells in the body will deplete and what that means is that the cat can become immunocompromised, so they're more sensitive to other infections, they can get respiratory infections, skin infections, more likely to have gum disease as well, so like stomatitis. So basically when your cat, FIV cat, is brought to the clinic, they will definitely check and pay attention to all those things. So I got this plant and Keef seems to be really liking it. It is a areca palm that is safe for cats but you really shouldn't eat that many leaves because they can get stuck in the body, so we'll try to stop him from doing that but I think he is having a lot of fun. Kitty, stop eating them! Poor leaves! Okay, so we'll backtrack a little bit and talk about the transmission. So we said, you know, transmission is because they fight and they bite and they transmit from the saliva, the virus enters the body system. That's why we recommend FIV cats to be kept indoors in a single cat household because we want to prevent the spread to the healthy population of cats outside. So then comes the question of can my FIV cat live with my other healthy non-FIV cats and the traditional recommendation is to say isolate them would be better because we don't want to spread the disease to them. However, there's a very interesting 2014 paper that did a retrospective study looking at a population of FIV negative, so non-FIV cats, and FIV positive cats and over three years they tested the population again, so basically they housed all these cats together at a cat rescue. They tested the population again and they did not find any vertical transmission, so they did not find any transmission of FIV between the healthy non-FIV and the FIV cats in the same generation. Even though they lived together, they shared food and water bowls, they groomed each other and they only had very minor minor signs of aggression. So what this means is that it really depends on your circumstance whether or not you should house your FIV cat with your non-FIV cats. The ideal situation is to isolate them so there's zero risk of them spreading and you know using separate bowls and stuff, but if they live together we would advise to reduce any chance of aggression, so things like neutering them to make sure they don't have any hormonal aggression, preparing enough resources, enough food and water bowls and litter trays so that they don't feel territorial and aggressive because there's enough resources, and also keeping them separate initially and gradually introduce them to each other. But the best ideal situation is an because there is also some studies done by Glasgow University that single household FIV positive cats tend to have a longer survival time compared to FIV cats that live in a multi-cat household. So the research is still ongoing and you know we may find different things in the future, but this is the current recommendations. So now we move on to the management and sort of the survival time. As we mentioned earlier, being positive for FIV is not a death sentence, it just means that you may need to pay more attention to your cat's health, going for regular annual checkups, making sure that their gums are well looked after because they can be prone to getting inflammation of the gums and their respiratory, so their lungs, breathing system, their skin, their guts, you know all these things should be regularly checked at your vets and they can make the best recommendations for your cats and also identify any problems and treat them early so that we give your cats the best chance of success. Obviously if your cat is suffering from a lot of other clinical conditions and it's not showing any response to treatments, then the outcome can be quite poor. So there's also a 2013 paper on the clinical findings and survival in cats naturally infected with FIV and what that study looked at was populations of FIV infected and non-infected populations, they compared the blood work results and looked at survival long term and what they found was there was no significant difference in survival times, however euthanasia accounts for the main reason why FIV cats have lower survival times. So what that basically means is that FIV cats, as long as they stay in the asymptomatic phase, they can really live a long and healthy life. I know it depends on each cat but basically the current recommendation is that we have to treat FIV positive cats with extra care, don't use FIV as like a death sentence and make sure we investigate any other ongoing diseases before we make any decisions in terms of quality of life and euthanasia. Personally for Keith, I vaccinate him and I flea and worm him because I work at the vet clinic so he can get a little bit of risk being exposed to these agents even though I try my best to you know shower, clean, disinfect everything when I get home. Also I ensure that he gets a complete and balanced diet so nutrition is important to make sure that he's as healthy as he can be and I also spoil him with lots of enrichment and treats because as an indoor cat you have a whole other set of issues and challenges, things like enough enrichment to avoid them being too stressed, they can get stress cystitis which we don't want especially in indoor male cats and that's a whole other conversation but we do our best to make sure he has lots of fresh water and lots of treats as well and you can see that he is fairly happy living the chill life at home instead of being out on the streets. So that's it for FIV, if you are interested we will be talking about FIP and also what happened to Keith last year. I almost lost him and touch wood he's doing well on his medications, he's finished his medications now and he seems really fine so let's talk about FIP and what happened with Keith. So I'll see you in the next video!