Feline Upper Respiratory Tract Infection in animal shelters
What is Cat Flu?
Feline upper respiratory tract infection (colloquially called ‘cat flu’)
is a severe problem in cat populations around the world. It is
especially of concern in animal shelters, where animals often face poor
air circulation, high turnover of populations, concurrent comorbidities
and previous malnourishment. Infections lead to increased morbidity,
compromised welfare quality of life and increased euthanasia rates.
Feline herpesvirus (FHV), feline calicivirus (FCV), Chlamydia felis
(C.felis), Mycoplasma felis (M.felis) and Bordetella bronchiseptica
(B.bronchiseptica) are commonly known to cause clinical disease.
Clinical signs include serous, mucoid, or mucopurulent nasal discharge,
sneezing, dyspnoea, conjunctivitis and ocular discharge, and ulcerations
of the lips, tongue, gums, or nasal planum. Infected cats often become
chronic carriers and can continue to shed the viruses for their
lifetime. This chronicity of disease can cause permanent scarring of
nasal passages, leading to chronic sinusitis, and recurrent bacterial
infections of the upper respiratory tract.
How can we better understand the epidemiology and risk factors
associated with this disease?
We used natural language processing and machine learning to obtain case
ascertainment from a large retrospective dataset of electronic
veterinary records from RSPCA Queensland. With the help of a detailed
causal framework, we used multiple models to quantify causal effects of
admission variables (source, gender, age), number of animals in care,
length of stay, time spent in foster and season on risk of cat flu. We
conducted PCR tests on incoming animals to determine the prevalence of
new infections, and explored what role this may have on the overall
burden of clinical disease.
