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Cat owners in the US should be on the lookout for something called bobcat fever, an often fatal feline infection. Dr. Leah Cohn, a professor of small animal internal medicine at the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine, explains. Bobcat fever is the colloquial or common name for a disease called Cytauxzoonosis. It is a protozoal infection, so it's a type of infection, but it's not a bacteria, and it's not a virus, and it's not a fungus. Entomologist Dr. Sonya Swiger says the disease is carried by some nasty little arachnids. It's a parasite actually carried in the blood of bobcats, and it's picked up by ticks, and it can be transmitted to domestic cats. And the natural reservoir host is a
bobcat, which is how it gets the name bobcat fever. While bobcats rarely experience serious illness from the disease that bears their name, the same cannot be said for house cats who get bitten by infected ticks. Domestic cats, when they get the infection, they have a really profound acute early stage. It's called schizogony. These organisms get inside of the mononuclear cells, and they grow, and they grow until you get these monstrously huge cells that block blood flow, and it causes organ damage. So, it causes multiple organ failure in the cats, and they develop an illness that progresses very, very quickly. The illness generally starts about 10 to 15 days after the cat was bitten by a tick, but once they
become ill, they go from looking, a little off, to severe illness within a day, and often death within 3 days. So, it's a very quick thing. Unfortunately, Dr. Cohn says it's often too late for cats who present with the illness. We do know of treatments that can be helpful, but there are no treatments that are fantastic, unfortunately. If you do recognize they have Cytauxzoon, there is a treatment that's a combination of antimalarial and antibiotics that results in about 50% survival. So, it's certainly better than no survival, but 50% is not great odds.
You certainly would not want to have those odds for your own cat. So, we need better treatments. There's no vaccine for bobcat fever. So, the best thing cat owners can do is prevent their cats from getting bitten by ticks in the first place. You definitely want to put some type of preventative treatments, uh, flea and tick medicines on your animals to prevent those ticks from being able to attach and take a blood meal. Your best bet is to keep your cat indoors and to use good prescription-level tick prevention. But, even indoor cats really ought to use tick prevention as well.
It's hard to be too careful. Dr. Cohn knows this from a sad personal experience. After studying Cytauxzoon for years, I lost a cat 2 years ago to Cytauxzoon, and I literally had seen my cat on Friday, and he was perfectly fine. Um, he was an indoor-outdoor cat, and he did use tick prevention, but it's not perfect. It's good. It's not perfect. On Saturday morning, I remember thinking, "He looks a little bit off." And then Saturday afternoon, when I got home from doing things at work, I was like, "I'm worried he might have Cytauxzoon." I brought him in the hospital. I did blood smears and looked for the organism, didn't find it. So, maybe he's just having a bad day. And the next day, he was very
ill, and he died the next morning. Though it is spreading, bobcat fever is still mostly confined to certain regions. It's found mostly in the southern and midwestern and eastern parts of the United States. The ticks that do vector this bobcat fever are known to be the lone star ticks and then the Dermacentor variabilis, which are the American dog ticks, are another vector. But both those tick species live in the same habitat, so they're both found in the south, especially in the southeast, and we are seeing expansion of the lone star ticks currently into more northern states.
The epicenter is really Missouri. It was first described in Missouri at the University of Missouri. But Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Virginia, North Carolina, you know, these are really, really heavily endemic areas for Cytauxzoon. Ticks are associated with wildlife, so it is important to keep that in mind if you do have large wildlife populations in your area, you definitely have ticks. Um whether you see them or not. But there's lots of things that ticks carry. And when I was in school, they were referred to as dirty syringes, their mouth parts, because they do have ability to carry so many different pathogens of different types.
The moral to the story is to keep ticks off of your cats.
