Suppose that your cat was diagnosed with feline infectious peritonitis (FIP) and you searched the internet and did everything you could to find the latest and best treatment for FIP. However, despite your best efforts, having spent thousands of dollars on the best treatment available, your cat deteriorated and died. A post mortem on the cat revealed that he didn’t have FIP after all—he had another condition which would have been perfectly treatable by a course of antibiotics, or an operation. How would you feel? You could have saved your cat’s life, and saved yourself lots of anguish and money, if only the diagnosis had been correct.
In 2016, in the Canadian Vet Journal, veterinary pathologist Dr Cohen and her colleagues described a misdiagnosed case of toxoplasmosis, who ended up on their post mortem table. A simple blood test for toxoplasma antibodies, and a course of the antibiotic clindamycin, would have saved the cat. Immunosuppressants, commonly given to cats with FIP, would kill a cat with toxoplasmosis. A wrong diagnosis, especially one of FIP, can be worse than no diagnosis.
Or take the case of Bree, who was diagnosed with FIP and started on prednisolone treatment. His guardian sent me his details and I advised that he have an operation immediately to look for a foreign body in his intestines: his veterinary surgeon found a rubber stopper and Bree recovered after an operation to remove it. Had he continued his prednisolone treatment, it is likely his bowel would have ruptured and caused his death. Bree is alive and well 5 years later. Around 80% of non-effusive FIP diagnoses turn out to be erroneous.
If YOUR cat has been diagnosed as having FIP, go to the catvirus.com downloads page, get the latest version of my FIP diagnosis algorithm—it is free—and take it to your veterinary surgeon. The algorithm is available in a number of languages, although the most up-to-date one is always the English one.
http://www.catvirus.com/downloads.html
If your veterinary surgeon works through this algorithm step by step, the chances of a wrong FIP diagnosis should be reduced considerably. Also download the questionnaire for cat guardians and answer the questions so that step 1 of the algorithm will already be completed for you to hand to your veterinarian, saving time during your consultation.
For more information, visit www.catvirus.com or read “FIP and Coronavirus,” a book for cat guardians by DD Addie, available from Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Feline-Infectious-Peritonitis-Coronavirus-Everything-ebook/dp/B00P8BNA0I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1514654434&sr=8-1&keywords=addie+feline+infectious+peritonitis
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Apologies for the uneven sound level: I’m still not wholly used to the Audacity program.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Isabel Galera for allowing Bree’s case to be used, for the photographs of Bree and his foreign body. I also thank her most sincerely for translating “FIP and Coronavirus” into Spanish.
Reference
Cohen TM, Blois S, Vince AR. Fatal extraintestinal toxoplasmosis in a young male cat with enlarged mesenteric lymph nodes. Can Vet J. 2016 57(5):483-6.
