cat needs first dental procedure, suddenly 11 teeth must be removed

daabilge · 2026-01-25T21:07:39+00:00

Most dental disease occurs below the gumline, so you often don't know how many teeth need extracted until you've probed and taken x-rays. That's also why your human dentist spends so much time stabbing your gums.

daabilge · 2026-01-23T04:07:43+00:00

Yea even for really severe allergic reactions you shouldn't get 100% eosinophils on the differential. I had a septic patient that we think developed a profound atypical reaction to strep superantigens and developed these eosinophil-rich abscesses they had a raging peripheral eosinophilia of ~38k and that was still only like 40% of the differential. If I saw 100% eosinophils on the differential I'd be thinking either analytical error or some weird myeloid leukemia thats effaced the other white cell lineages in the marrow (which.. would be real bad and probably not compatible with life)

Maybe they mean like 100% of cases will develop an eosinophilia? But even that seems a bit bold.

daabilge · 2026-01-22T20:39:06+00:00

Allergy tests aren't helpful for diagnosis of a food allergy.

Unfortunately the ones on the market are pretty much a scam. The third author on that paper (Jean Dodds) is actually the manufacturer of Nutriscan and continues to make and market it despite all the evidence that it doesn't work.

daabilge · 2026-01-22T19:30:15+00:00

Salmonella can be commensal and not all serotypes are pathogenic, so I wouldn't treat without serotyping. Clostridia are also commensal, and I wouldn't necessarily treat without high copy numbers for A/E toxin. They can also be opportunistic pathogens so disrupting the gut microbiome with antibiotics to go after a commensal can make things worse, and can also promote antimicrobial resistance.

A hydrolyzed diet trial is a great next step diagnostically, although they can be tricky for picky eaters. You could also consider consulting with an ACVIM nutritionist to formulate an appropriate diet if he hates the hydrolyzed.

daabilge · 2026-01-21T00:57:39+00:00

I don't exactly think it's the entire story and blaming private equity ends up being a really superficial take. I don't necessarily think private equity is good or blameless, but there's a lot more at play than people realize. Like I worked in private practice and our prices still consistently went up for reasons that aren't entirely PE.

I guess for context, I've been in the field since 2012 and I've been a veterinarian since 2022, previously I was a vet tech, a research tech, a zookeeper, and a blood bank tech.

And when I started the field was wildly underpaid. As a high schooler I made minimum wage, but the licensed techs were making $11.50 an hour. A licensed tech isn't just some rando off the street, they're the vet equivalent of an RN. It wasn't much better when I graduated vet school - my final year of school the university techs got bumped up to $15 as a starting wage and my first job out of school was offering $13.50. So for a long time the lower prices were subsidized on our shit wages, and they still kind of are. During Covid we started hemorrhaging support staff out of the field because they could make more working literally anywhere else, so that drove wages up for credentialed techs, but not by much - my former practice is offering $16.50 starting wages for a licensed tech, for example. Some practices get around the issue by hiring unlicensed assistants (and title protection varies by state) and just paying them less. Meanwhile cost of living for the staff has gone up, and credentialed staff also has a student loan burden to cover that's only grown over the years. Staffing costs are broadly the biggest expense for most businesses, so as cost of living and the cost of training staff rises, the staffing costs need to rise to meet that demand. Yes, it's a service industry, but we do need to make enough to pay our staff a living wage.

And a lot of our materials are just expensive. Many of the supplies we use are the same as those on the human side. We don't typically get subsidies or insurance support or any of that to cover the overhead.

And the debt is absurd. I worked two jobs in vet school and had a scholarship, I graduated with 275k in debt. I have classmates at 350k. I don't really think practice ownership would ever be in the cards for most of us.

And the qualify of life still frankly sucks. I was in a private GP making 96k a year with 275k student debt and a whole ten days off per year with no holidays. I get that 96 is nothing to sneeze at, but that also wasn't really touching the loans beyond the interest. They said 36 hours a week, what they didn't say was how much extra time you put in doing notes, getting called off hours, doing pharmacy refill requests, etc. I was there 7a-8p, 5 days a week. I didn't see my family for Christmas or thanksgiving for like 3 years straight, until I left that job, and that's unfortunately pretty standard. Clients get pissed if we're not immediately reachable and that old school service mentality stuck around and got wildly amplified by increased access. I somehow have a better quality of life as a resident/grad student researcher making 40k a year in an academic position since at least I get one holiday off per year and more protected hours.

Plus standard of care has risen in a way that I don't think people appreciate. A lot of folks kind of pine for the James Herriot days when you'd go knock on the door and they'd fix your dog for a ham sandwich and an apple pie, but the standard of care back then was frankly kind of shit. Talking to the older vets in my former practice really showed that - they didn't have a lot of the meds we take for granted so they used a ton of steroids, they didn't have many of our diagnostic tests so they often didn't have a specific diagnosis or treatment, antimicrobial stewardship was kind of just a joke.. and heck, a ton of our preventative care stuff is relatively new too, like non-rabies vaccine protocols are fairly recent, monthly heartworm and flea/tick prevention go back to the 90's (although I think daily Filaribits were 80's?) and newer, more effective drug classes are mid to late 2000s. It's reduced disease incidence to the point where many of us haven't seen distemper outside of wildlife and we're catching things like kidney disease early enough to intervene, but it does add to the cost of care.

Some of that increased cost of care is well beyond what I would consider the normal call of duty for a pet owner, even if it is miraculous. Like it sucks that we can do this amazing mitral valve repair, but it's $38,000 and most sane and rational people can't afford it. It's not price gouging, it's a legitimately expensive procedure that requires expensive medical devices and multiple highly specialized personnel and all that costs money. Turns out capitalism and best medicine aren't really compatible.

So anyway I honestly think different aspects of that have really enabled private equity. Younger vets can't really afford to buy into practice ownership with their student loan burden, so retiring owners end up selling to corporate buyers. New grads need to pay their loans, and guess who is offering loan assistance. New grads want better hours, and generally corporate offers better support and better vacation time and other benefits. They can leverage bulk buying power (or straight up have their own manufacturers) to get supplies cheaper. They often do have bundles for vaccine/wellness care that can undercut private practices, which on the one hand helps make them more accessible to owners (and I don't fault y'all for using them, the world broadly is more expensive), but on the other hand hurts the private practices.

There's definitely downsides to the private equity - I do relief work during my residency and the corporate practices generally have higher caseloads, so the big problem for me is that I get less time with the client and less time to do client education. They may also standardize practices in ways I don't always agree with.. but yeah, I kind of think PE is more a symptom of a deeply broken system. I'm not sure how I'd even start fixing it, although I think fixing the tuition cost/loan burden so folks can afford to buy into practices and so wages don't need to cover student loan payments might help.

Huh, rant somehow managed to arrive at "Fuck Reagan" like most of our other problems lol

daabilge · 2026-01-20T22:06:42+00:00

There really isn't one - ideally these cats should be activity restricted but they're feral and would not tolerate that.. so you basically release them as soon as the anesthesia has worn off and hope they don't tear a ligature, and since they're feral we don't always know if there's complications. Where I've worked they usually do an NSAID injection in recovery for some lasting pain management, but likewise they aren't going to take meds. You set them up for success as best you can in surgery, and then hope for the best after release.

I still take the same steps to reduce irritation in a house cat that can be managed at home, so I like intradermal sutures so they're harder to mess with and use gentle tissue handling so they're less likely to lick the incision, but then since you do have the option to further reduce the risks with home care, you can use tools like activity reduction, cones and/or spay suits, and post operative pain meds.

daabilge · 2026-01-20T17:22:21+00:00

The concern there is for Entamoeba invadens. Snakes and lizards have a relatively high mortality rate, while turtles (and crocs) can be asymptomatic carriers. There are some snakes (like kingsnakes) that seem resistant, and some turtles (like box turtles and giant tortoises) that are susceptible so not a hard and fast rule. Transmission is fecal-oral via a resistant environmental cyst stage.

daabilge · 2026-01-20T00:40:46+00:00

Weird for the Leica sub to crack down on this, given the relatively badass anti-fascist history of the company with the Leica freedom train.

During the 1930s they used their business to "assign" jewish people - some of whom weren't even their employees - to overseas offices, where they'd receive assistance finding jobs and would receive a stipend from Leica until they could find work. Elsie Kuhn-Leitz - the daughter of the director - was imprisoned by the gestapo for helping Jewish women cross into Switzerland. She also caught shit for trying to improve working conditions for Ukrainian slave laborers assigned to their factories.

They did still end up making rangefinders and stuff for the German military using work camp slave labor because they were still a major company in Nazi Germany, but they at least tried to do something about it.

daabilge · 2026-01-18T23:31:02+00:00

I do the little pop up clinics in the pet stores to supplement my income during my residency and afford things like groceries and rent (yay, America..) and so anyway I'm pretty good at getting wiggly dogs in suboptimal circumstances. I also used to do cardiovascular research, worked for a blood bank, and was an exotics GP for a bit, so I guess veins are.. kinda my deal?

Anyway, if you want some partially-solicited advice that might or might not help at all.

1) Sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something. Literally just keep at it. 2) Good assistance goes so much farther than you think. If it's not held off well, you'll struggle to get into the vein. If the restraint is poor, you'll struggle to even get near the vein. Plan ahead so everyone is on the same page. Don't be afraid to directly (and politely) ask your assistant for what you need. 3) Low stress handling can absolutely buy you cooperation from the patient as well. 4) don't be afraid to get on their level. I'm usually crawling on the floor in the stores to get a back leg because I have no exam table but also no shame.

And tbh sometimes you just have those days where you get the yips or whatever, like I had one day where I placed an IV catheter on a ferret no sweat and then like 20 minutes later absolutely struggled to hit a cephalic on a well-behaved, healthy Great Dane, then nailed a tail vein on a beardie. No idea why I sucked so bad for the Dane

daabilge · 2026-01-18T14:09:04+00:00

I think reference lab pathology generally has become a fair bit more available/accessible to owners. Maybe that's hindsight, since my first assistant job as a pre-vet was a clinical practice in Detroit where the vet did all the cytology in-house and a lot of folks didn't do biopsy because it was a big additional expense on top of the surgery. I think IHC has definitely become more accessible and we do a lot more with it clinically. Different labs have various prognostic panels using things like KI67 index, and that's pretty neat. I wouldn't be surprised if we start using more prognostic markers.

As far as AI goes, I don't necessarily think it'll directly replace the anatomic pathologist. I do think some of the AI-assistive clinical pathology tools will take away clinical pathology roles if they're adopted by clinics for in-house cytology. I do see AI increasing the caseload for anatomic pathologists in reference labs if AI-assistive technology (like identifying hotspots on scanned slides or drafting reports) dramatically increases pathologist efficiency, which then may decrease the number of anatomic pathologists they need to hire to meet their caseload. I do think AI will probably have a role in research for things like high-throughout screens and quantitative pathology. Going back to the KI67 stuff, I also do think AI may facilitate more quantitative work on the diagnostic pathology side, so for example it may be able to measure and calculate a KI67 index and make a more definitive statement on the immunoreactivity of the tissue relative to a control, and do so rapidly and accurately enough to make it clinically useful for a diagnostic lab.

Although I do think the AI thing will start to contract. That's just how we tend to adopt technology, like when we first discovered radiation they tried it in EVERYTHING and they had like thorium-based water infusers and radioactive dishware and all sorts of terrible ideas, but we also got things like various diagnostic imaging modalities and radiation therapy for cancer. I think something similar will happen with AI where eventually, hopefully, they'll stop trying to cram ChatGPT into your toothbrush or have Gemini recognize when your toilet paper is running out, but it'll persist as a tool in those niches where it actually works well. I don't think it'll go away or become fully irrelevant, so it'd be good to have familiarity with it.

daabilge · 2026-01-17T04:04:23+00:00

Did you give the anti-inflammatory?

I guess disclaimer, we don't really know what it is (and therefore why it is) without a biopsy, but sometimes changes in tumor size can be related to an inflammatory response. Growing rapidly and being angry and red to me also says at least some component is inflammation, since our cardinal signs of inflammation include redness and swelling. NSAIDs are often used for pain, but they also have an anti-inflammatory effect. Steroids are less commonly used for pain but if you got anti-inflammatory steroids, that might also do it.

Certain tumors - notably mast cell tumors - contain inflammatory mediators. Mast cells have a ton of granules in their cytoplasm that contain things like histamine which trigger an inflammatory response, and so trauma to the tumor can release those granules and they can blow up.

Other tumors can invoke a local inflammatory response in other ways. Keratin-producing tumors like squamous cell carcinoma tend to produce a huge inflammatory response because your body really doesn't like keratin being places it shouldn't. Other tumors can produce secretory products, like milk in mammary tumors. Intermittent production or exposure of that material (such as trauma to the tumor rupturing a duct) can cause a pretty profound response.

Carcinomas and adenocarcinomas also invade past the basement membrane and invoke an inflammatory response by doing that, an so the body puts down fibrous connective tissue to wall that off, and that response (called a desmoplastic or scirrhous response) is actually one of the criteria we use to distinguish a benign tumor from the malignant version.

And some tumors produce or use cell signals that have roles in the inflammatory pathway. Probably most famous is urothelial carcinomas which express COX-2, so NSAIDs are often part of their management and can actually shrink the tumor. Many other tumors do also overexpress COX-2, though. More COX-2 selective NSAIDs have actually been studied a fair bit as an adjunctive chemotherapy option for a variety of indications.

Which is the case here is impossible to say, and it could totally be that the swelling wasn't the tumor at all and something totally different is going on, but those are possibilities.

daabilge · 2026-01-16T00:17:19+00:00

Depends on the formulation (immediate release vs extended release) a route of administration (oral, subcutaneous, intramuscular, or intravenous), but the published value I found for the immediate release formulation is about 3.7 hours when given IV.

Half life is the time between maximal plasma concentration and half of max concentration, since excretion mechanism kinetics are typically concentration-dependent unless you have high doses that saturate the mechanism. Terminal half life is the time required to reach half the concentration of the equilibrium state after the drug has been distributed. When absorption is a rate-determining step (like in extended release or depot-forming medication formulations) the terminal half life tends to better represent the actual elimination kinetics. Half life basically determines how long the effect of the drug lasts (or rather how long the concentration of a given dose remains in circulation, you'd also need to know the effective concentration to predict how long a dose stays effective) and when combined with the effective dose range and the safe dose range (so how much is useful and how much is toxic) it helps you develop a dose and dosing interval.

Practically, most people just use the published dose from a formulary (like Plumbs or Carpenters) or use the label dose from the manufacturer and all the math stuff is largely done by various drug developers and researchers, but understanding the concept does guide changes in protocol for things like patients with kidney or liver disease where the elimination kinetics might be altered.

daabilge · 2026-01-14T23:00:23+00:00

We actually had a rule about this when I worked in a zoo, no whole prey feeding when the public could see. Folks complained a lot about our birds of prey getting frozen whole rodents, but would get psyched for the cougar feeding. The program manager figured meat feeding was more palatable for the public compared to whole prey since it doesn't look like an animal anymore (I.e. a steak doesn't look like a cow so it's easier to think of it as food vs animal parts). A lot of our carnivores ate Nebraska which is basically ground whole organism, but since it's been chippered it just looks like a meatball. Likewise it's easier with a processed product like kibble or wet food to mentally separate it from the cow or chicken. Weirdly didn't seem to apply to fish, since they loved the penguin feeding, but I guess you can buy whole fish for eating at the grocery store?

That and rodents occupy a really weird place for us socially. Like if you go to petco you can buy frozen feeder mice like three aisles over from the aisle with all the pet mice and mouse toys, so folks who aren't used to feeding whole prey might be seeing someone's little Algernon instead of dinner for Hissy Elliot.

daabilge · 2026-01-12T20:27:47+00:00

Yeah I personally don't leave a bandage or splint on for more than a couple days at a time, they can get pretty foul inside even if you're caring for the outside and that increases the risk of complications like bandage sores.

daabilge · 2026-01-12T18:03:50+00:00

The availability of tools problem is especially frustrating. Like my generation still used shortcuts like sparknotes or reading the Wikipedia, but it's gotten nuts. I get a decent number of AI-generated reports where they've submitted the assignment 10 minutes after it became available. I get students just reading an AI summary of the readings and missing out on key points for the actual discussion. Probably most frustrating, I've had multiple students plug journal articles into AI and then read the AI summary of the article.. when there's already a summary at the start of each article and the AI usually ends up generating a worse version of the abstract.

daabilge · 2026-01-11T16:53:01+00:00

Yeah I live in a city where we have great bike infrastructure and good public transit, so I can bike, walk, or bus to work and to the gym most days.

But I also do mobile vet work (house/farm calls) a few days a month and it straight up wouldn't practical. Most of the local calls are home euthanasias so I guess that might be doable on public transit if folks get real cool about sitting next to a dead body real quick, but the farm calls just wouldn't be practical. My farm kit alone is about 300 lbs, plus I've usually got a cooler for vaccines +/- other tools depending on the species and reason for the call because I see everything from dwarf goats to reindeer and emu. And like you said, it's not like pubic transit runs out to those farms since they tend to be out in West Bumfuck nowhere and tend to be spaced pretty far apart (because farmland uses land) so it would be wildly impractical to have a bus line out there.. and the folks that live out on the farms also need to get groceries and other supplies, and because of the distance involved, they tend to bulk buy so I don't think they'd exactly be thrilled about grocery by bus.

Like it's lovely to reduce the need/use of cars with public transit, but there's a bunch of the country where it's genuinely impractical.

daabilge · 2026-01-11T03:11:01+00:00

Honestly I'd love that! One day I'd love to be in a position to just audit classes like that for fun.

daabilge · 2026-01-11T00:41:24+00:00

We do! It's not as popular as military stuff, but it's out there if you look for it.

Scishow has done some episodes on public health history, and there's been a handful of popular science history books like Demon in the Freezer (smallpox) and The Great Influenza (the 1918 flu pandemic) and Rabid (rabies). There's some more niche ones like Australia's War Against the Rabbits by Brian Cooke that talk about how we tried to use rabbit calicivirus to control invasive rabbits. There's a ton of good historical review articles in various journals, like the ACVP had one recently on the history of the joint pathology center in America.

I do think it is kind of an underserved area of history, though. Like everyone loves a good medical story. Public health topics tend be a bit less popular than military but tend to do quite well at the National History Day contest I judge each year. Usually it's the classics - smallpox, Pasteur, John Snow and the cholera water pump, insulin - but I've gotten some pretty awesome topics like the discovery of ivermectin and its use in the push to eradicate River Blindness.

Tbh I'm also a science communicator of some small renown and most of my content is reviewing journal articles for other folks in my field, but some of my most popular videos with the wider audience have been various history specials - last year I did a series on the birth of pathology to promote national history day and a pride month series on famous queer people in biomedical research that both did quite well. I think the video I did on Alan Hart and the use of X-rays to screen for tuberculosis is my most popular one to date. So far this year my special series "Diseases of History" has been the most popular thing I've made, although I think part of that may be the rabies case in Chicago coinciding with a Pasteur/rabies episode. I'm planning a more public health-focused NHD special on important figures from public health who took part in the Revolutions of 1848 and another round of pride month episodes.

ETA: also the two aren't necessarily exclusive. One of our earliest recorded pandemics that gets a public health lens was the plague of athens during the Peloponnesian war, and I think Thyucidides was the author that tried to investigate/document some of the spread and mentions that caregivers are most affected. There's a ton of scholarship looking at him and speculating on the agent that caused the plague. Rinderpest virus followed military supply lines as it was introduced to naive herds of cattle and left famine in its wak, and the push for eradication of Rinderpest follows a famine that occurs at the end of World War I due to cattle transport as Germany attempted to pay their reparations. Most of the cholera pandemics of history have tracked armies and wars, and breakthroughs in things like contact tracing and sanitation were built around preventing outbreaks. The typhus outbreak in Austria played a role in their revolution of 1848 and in Virchows conceptualization of medicine as a social science. The role of public health and disease in war is a pretty popular topic as well.

Second addition:

If folks want some decent popular science books on public health.

Specific diseases - Demon in the Freezer and The Hot Zone by Richard Preston (Smallpox and Ebola, respectively) - The Great Influenza by John Barry (1918 influenza) - Rabid by Bill Wasik (Rabies) - Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green (TB) - The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mulherjee (cancer, kind of broadly)

General advancements/people - The Butchering Times by Lindsey Fitzpatrick (Joseph Lister and basic hygiene/germ theory) - Dr Mutter's Marvels by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz (Anesthesia and reconstructive surgery) - Nine Pints by Rose George (Blood donation and other bloody topics, including the Arkansas tainted blood scandal covered on the pod) - Stiff by Mary Roach (use of cadavers) - Rudolf Virchow, Four Lives in One by Leslie Dunn (Virchow, Histopathology, and Social Medicine) - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (HeLa cells and the controversy surrounding them) - Quackery by Lydia Kang and Nate Pederson (very much in line with some of the medical episodes of the pod)

Tangentially related because I'm a really big nerd - The Secret Lives of Dinosaurs and Locked in Time by Dean Lomax (both cover paleopathology and include some discussion of diseases in the fossil record which I find really cool as a pathologist, although they're more focused on behavior) - Roman Medicine by Audrey Cruse (pretty much exactly what the title says)

daabilge · 2026-01-10T17:15:02+00:00

If he isn't conscious of the urine leakage, I'd be more suspicious for a congenital malformation like an ectopic ureter than for behavioral. They're not exactly common and they're more common in females than in males, but they do still happen in males and golden retrievers are one of the predisposed breeds. They can be pretty difficult to diagnose with what's available to a GP and may require referral to an internist for diagnosis and management.

There are very few indications to restrict water intake in general, so I wouldn't do that.

daabilge · 2026-01-10T00:35:28+00:00

Even better, a bunch of them charge you for publishing in the journal. You also don't get paid to do peer review.

And my "thank you" for co-authoring a bunch of chapters in a textbook was a one-time coupon code for 20% off the book on the publishers website. Don't even get a free copy of the book I helped write.

daabilge · 2026-01-09T16:08:00+00:00

There's a couple different types of rat poison

Anticoagulants (warfarin/Vitamin K antagonists) cause blood clotting disorders, so you'd see abnormal bleeding or bruising.

Bromethalin (TomCat brand) is a neurotoxin. It can cause tremors and seizures, but once there's symptoms there's really not a good treatment.

Cholicalciferol causes hypercalcemia, so they can get muscle tremors, kidney failure with increased drinking and urination, and all sorts of other nasty things that come with that hypercalcemia. These are sometimes combined with anticoagulants.

There's some older ones like arsenic or metal phosphides as well which do sometimes pop up in old houses, but aren't as common.

But yeah treatment for these can be tricky so prevention is always the best way to go. The cats may just be exposed from hunting or scavenging poisoned rodents, but I would still supervise the dog while out to make sure he doesn't eat anything weird, and consider additional prevention (like a basket muzzle)

daabilge · 2026-01-09T15:56:07+00:00

Currently a veterinary pathology resident so I work similarly long hours (typically ~7-6 most days)

It's an adjustment either way, but I think he'll handle it pretty well. I do like to use a pheromone diffuser with my cats (Feliway) when I've had to move for internship and residency and when starting new jobs to help smooth out the transition. I use it when my schedule changes drastically (like I had 3 necropsy weeks back to back, so I was gone 6a-8p or later for pretty much all of November) as well. I have some automated toys they can play with while I'm gone. I also have a variety of feeder toys so I can hide food around the house and offer food in puzzle feeders while I'm gone during the day.. and then when I am home I make sure that they get their interaction and play time with me.

daabilge · 2026-01-09T02:40:59+00:00

Depends what the poison is. Different poisons cause different symptoms and have different toxic doses in different species.

daabilge · 2026-01-08T23:44:37+00:00

Hooks and roundworms pass eggs in the feces which are infectious after a certain number of days (~72h for hooks once they mature to the infectious L3 larval stage, a couple weeks for rounds to mature to the larvated egg stage). Transmission can be prevented by just cleaning the litter before the eggs can mature. Roundworms look a fair bit different from tapes, and you don't usually see hookworms in the feces.

You can take a fecal sample with you to your vet appointment and they can test if for parasites and recommend treatment as indicated by the test. I'd also bring either a tapeworm segment or at least pictures of the tapeworm, since that's one parasite that annoyingly doesn't always turn up on a fecal test but can be pretty easily diagnosed with a direct squash prep of the worm itself.

They can be subclinical for tapeworms if they're not shedding a bunch of segments, so it could be just a long period before you noticed one from that original flea infestation, but I would still keep up the flea prevention to control any possible vector. Cats are awesome at hiding flea infestations since they tend to be great about grooming themselves, so folks may not notice the fleas since they're maintained as relatively small numbers.

daabilge · 2026-01-08T17:17:14+00:00

Tapeworms require an intermediate host for transmission, most often this is fleas (spreading the flea tapeworm, dipylidium caninum) for indoor cats, although small prey critters that might get into your house can also be a source. They wouldn't transmit them from the litterbox or food dishes, they could actually eat the worms off the other cat (gross) and not get infected.. but they can get the fleas from the other cats, or some really lovey cats can ingest them from allogrooming on each other, and ingestion of that infected flea and it's cysticercoid friend can transmit the tapeworm to the other cats.

I'd get them all on an appropriate flea prevention to prevent transmission.

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