Dr. Lara walks through feline herpesvirus using a 12-week-old Persian kitten with sneezing, runny nose, and eye ulcers. The virus isn't transmissible to humans. L-lysine is the standard treatment to slow viral replication, and symptoms typically peak around day 5 before clearing in 7 to 14 days.
Hey guys, my name is Dr. Lara. So I'm here with this little 12 week old Persian kitten. And mom was bringing him in today just because she just got him, you know, less than a week ago. And when she was talking to the breeder, the breeder had told her that he had had a upper respiratory infection or like a snotty nose when he was about three weeks old. So whenever we have kittens and cats in general who tend to have a runny nose, sneezing, not feeling well, that kind of stuff, most commonly we're going to think of herpes. Now this kind of herpes, like the coronavirus, most viruses are going to be species specific. So that means that you cannot get the herpes from your cat and your cat cannot get any kind of herpes from you, like cold sores or any of that kind of stuff. The other thing is that the herpes in cats can, is usually going to manifest in a different way. Herpes and cats can manifest in ulcers on the eye. They can manifest in conjunctivitis, like so bad to where, like it swells up to where you can barely even see the eye. You can have ulcers in the mouth, you can have the snotty nose that I was talking about. They may just not feel well, they may not want to eat. And that is pretty much like the most common things that you'll see with this. Now there are a couple of other things that we might be concerned with, like calicivirus. That's something that typically will cause ulcers in the mouth. Chlamydia is something that would cause an infection. The conjunctivitis on the eye, herpes can look like any of those things. And it's something that, you know, we call it upper respiratory disease in cats. Now if your cat does have herpes, the most common treatment that we are going to use in veterinary medicine as of right now, is an amino acid called L Lysine. L Lysine is an amino acid that the thought is that it goes ahead and when the virus is replicating, so when you think of those helixes, those strands with the lines in between, there are amino acids on the end of each of those little strands. And so the L Lysine is replacing an amino acid on that strand, which helps to slow down or stop the reproduction of the virus. This particular treatment can fall, comes into favor, comes out of favor. It is something that as of right now, is not shown to hurt the cats. So typically it is one of the first treatments that I'll recommend for patients that are having upper respiratory signs. I'm not really a fan of putting patients on antibiotics for this particular thing because it is a virus and viruses do not respond to antibiotics. The only time I'll put a patient on antibiotics if I suspect they have herpes is if they're feeling really poorly. And I'm just concerned. And I want to make sure that there aren't any opportunistic pathogens that will cause issues while the immune system is trying to deal with therapies. So at the end of the day it is something that you will have to go ahead and kind of write it out. Typically I tell people assume it's going to take anywhere between seven to 14 days. You know, probably getting to its worst around day five and then starting to kind of taper off over the rest of the time frame. Other than that, if you guys have any questions about this particular topic, leave it in the comment box. If you found this video helpful, give us a thumbs up. Subscribe if you're interested, and share it with somebody if you think they should watch it. Thanks for watching and have a great day.
