Health

Some of the most peaceful moments of your day are spent sitting quietly with your cat, stroking her gently, peering into her gorgeous eyes. However, the serenity can well be interrupted if you happen to notice a crop of tiny, mean-looking little black spots on the otherwise lovely animals chin and lips. What youre apt to be observing are blackheads, the signs of feline acne, a dermatologic condition that affects male and female cats of all ages and breeds and could warrant a visit to your veterinarian.

Honestly, veterinary researchers werent trying to make liars out of cat owners when they published "Urinary biomarkers to assess exposure of cats to environmental tobacco smoke" in the American Journal of Veterinary Research (Vol. 68, No. 4). They were trying to advance the science of gas-chromatography analysis to search for toxins that might cause disease in pets. Out of 61 healthy cats in the urinalysis study, 19 came from households where the owners said cigarettes were smoked. And 42 came from homes where owners swore no one ever smoked.

Although indoor cats are far less likely than outdoor cats to contract a contagious disease, be ripped up in a brawl with other animals or be struck by a car, they are not completely out of harms way. Even within the confines of their own homes, they can suffer serious injuries, not the least of which are disabling (and even fatal) burns that result from a variety of factors, including their natural curiosity and, all too often, carelessness on the part of their owners. There are three categories of burns: thermal, chemical and electrical.

Your cats kidneys, two relatively small organs located behind its rib cage - one on each side of its spine - play a central role in almost all of its bodily processes. They help to control the blood pressure and regulate the amount and chemical consistency of fluid in the bloodstream. They produce a variety of vitally needed hormones and enzymes, and they contribute to the production of red blood cells.

Fever, lethargy, loss of appetite and evidence of painful stiffness in the muscles and joints are clinical signs of many ailments that can afflict your cat at any time of year. Some feline disorders, however, are more prevalent during warm weather, when higher temperatures stimulate the activity of disease-causing organisms and the parasites that can transmit them to your cat.

The eye is an amazing, delicate organ. Cells within the eye normally produce a clear fluid (aqueous humor) that serves to nourish and maintain the shape of the eye. When the balance between the production and the drainage of fluid is upset, glaucoma can result. Decreased drainage of fluid causes increased pressure (and pain) within the eye, often resulting in damage to the optic nerve and, consequently, loss of vision.

Your cats blood serves the same essential function that yours does, carrying oxygen and nutrients to tissues throughout the body and transporting carbon dioxide and wastes away from those tissues. Blood also serves in such processes as cell development, tissue repair and the warding off of infection. Considering the vital roles performed by this life-sustaining fluid, it is unlikely that any [IMGCAP(1)]veterinarian would dispute the wisdom of having your cats blood evaluated at least annually…

The statistics are sobering: Each year, according to the National Cancer Institute, approximately six million companion cats in the United States will be diagnosed with cancer, and more than half of cats over the age of 10 will die of the dreaded disease. A cure for feline cancer may be just a collar away. Bright orange Pet4Pets charity collars - similar to the popular cancer-awareness wrist bands, la Lance Armstrong - were introduced last spring, with the funds going toward groundbreaking cancer research being funded by the Animal Cancer Foundation (ACF) in Norwalk, Connecticut.

It hardly seems possible. But time flies, and what was once a rare procedure - kidney transplants for cats with renal failure - is now performed often enough that researchers can look at a relatively unusual complication of a once-rare operation. And they can give it a name: PTDM, or post-transplantation diabetes mellitus, as veterinary scientists from the University of California-Davis and the University of Pennsylvania did in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (Vol. 230, No. 6).

Thanks to advances in veterinary medicine, many of the cancers to which cats are susceptible are now controllable, sometimes curable, and even (in the case of mammary cancer, for example) potentially preventable. This does not always hold true, however, for osteosarcoma, a highly destructive feline bone cancer for which there is no known cure unless it is detected early.

Toxoplasmosis is a fairly common zoonosis (a disease that can be shared between humans and animals); 30 to 40 percent of adult humans, and roughly the same percentage of cats, have antibodies that indicate prior exposure to the organism that causes the disease. Nevertheless, its particulars are still unfamiliar to many people. The disease poses a threat primarily to fetuses and to immunosuppressed patients, but an understanding of the organisms life cycle, how transmission occurs and can be avoided, and the signs of infection can greatly reduce the risk of serious disease.

But the bacterium, Yersinia pestis, widely held to be the cause of the Black Death of antiquity is alive and well, causing roughly 1,000 to 2,000 human cases of plague every year, primarily in rural areas of developing countries. Requisites for the diseases persistence are the availability of rodent (or sometimes rabbit) "reservoirs" with the ability to reproduce to high numbers, the year-round feeding of appropriate flea "vectors" and the proper environmental conditions. In the United States, the majority of cases in reservoir rodents - usually rock squirrels, ground squirrels and prairie dogs - occurs in the Southwest, but infected animals may be seen anywhere west of the Rockies. During heavy outbreaks in these animals, cases have been detected as far east as Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas. Most human cases of plague in the U.S. arise from two areas: one in the region encompassing southern Colorado and northern New Mexico and Arizona, and the other encompassing western Nevada, California and southern Oregon.