Questions remain after the death of a little cat

Vets look into the causes of Tara's demise in the hope it might also provide some hints to a post-flood condition being seen in people

After last week's column about Tara, several readers ask what caused the death of such a young kitten, only one year old.

At this point, we don't know. The vets at Chulalongkorn's Small Animal Hospital are conducting a necropsy (an "autopsy" when a human is examined), and the final results will be available in another month or so.

Nevertheless, there are several possibilities. The first is that Tara's terrible diarrhoea was caused by a parasite. Some of the vets suspect that she acquired the parasite from my turtles somehow. I doubt it. If the turtles were indirectly responsible, then I would have seen the same problem in my other cats, but I haven't.

Besides, if a parasite was the cause, it was a parasite that could resist all the anti-parasite drugs we gave Tara.

Another possibility is that Tara suffered from Inflammatory (or "Irritable") Bowel Disease (Ibd), an illness of the gastro-intestinal tract that occurs in cats, dogs and even humans.

Symptoms are vomiting, diarrhoea and steady weight loss. Tara, however, didn't suffer from vomiting, and she did enjoy occasional weight gains.

Perhaps Tara had cancer. During the preliminary necropsy, the vets found very small lesions (inflammations) on every organ. The vets are now examining the organs for signs of cancer. I haven't heard anything about this point yet.

One other possibility is feline infectious peritonitis (Fip). This mysterious disease is almost always fatal, and there is no cure. A virus attacks a cat's white blood cells, and the cat's immune system isn't strong enough to protect against the inflammations these attacks cause.

Researchers think that the virus causing Fip might be passed from one cat to another in faeces. In fact, most cats have the virus, but some infected cats don't develop the disease and some do. Some researchers suspect that the cats who develop Fip have a gene that weakens their immunity to the disease.

Detection is difficult. There is no single test to identify Fip. Symptoms, such as too much fluid in the abdomen, poor appetite and nerve problems, appear in other illnesses. Also, one cat with Fip may show one set of symptoms, and another cat a totally different set.

Why worry about what killed Tara? One of the vets hopes to find the answer for a very personal reason. Her own cat is showing the symptoms that Tara had, the persistent diarrhoea and weight loss.

She also hopes to help with another problem. Some people caught in the recent floods are suffering from the same untreatable symptoms. Although Tara, as far as we know, was never in a flooded area, the vet thinks that perhaps if we can learn what killed Tara, we might help these people too.

In this way, humans might benefit from the death of one little cat.