Thank you very much, Emily. Good evening everybody. Last time during my FIP treatment webinar, I got for myself a reputation for bad jokes, and that's a reputation I'm keen not to lose.
So tonight from time to time, I will have excerpts from the Uxbridge Dictionary, which offers alternative meanings to different words. So for example, hullabaloo is to greet a bear. Just to lighten things a little bit because again it's quite a serious topic as you saw last time if you were with me, curing FIP isn't very straightforward.
It's not just simply a matter of getting rid of the virus because the virus interferes with the cat's immune response. So in every individual case of FIP there is a different pathogenesis, and you would have to tailor treatment to each individual cat. So this really is a disease where prevention is better than cure.
And these two cats here that I'm showing you are coronavirus free. OK, you think, well, that's not. News probably your own cats are coronavirus free, but the news with these two is that from kittenhood they have lived with the coronavirus carrier cat.
As you probably remember, the carrier cats shed coronavirus all the time in their faeces. And these two cats are in a 4 cat household where the the guardian is very coronavirus aware and she knows to keep these two cats absolutely away from the litter tray of the coronavirus carrier, and she's been doing that for well over a year with complete success, so you don't have to be an astronaut or a brain surgeon to do this. It's quite just simply a matter of good hygiene.
So the key message is that the single most effective way to prevent FIP is to prevent the kitten or cat ever becoming infected with feline coronavirus. Therefore, the best way to prevent FIP is by good hygiene, testing, and quarantine. I recently wrote a blog for Bio Gal called How to Avoid FIP in Your Cat, and I made the point that introducing an untested, especially pedigree kitten who may or may not be shedding coronavirus.
Introducing that kitten or cat to your existing cats is playing Russian roulette with their lives, and people objected to this rather dramatic and rather ugly photograph, but it's not nearly as distressing a photograph as one of a cat who has just died of FIP. And, and that blog, I have a link to that blog in your notes. A few years ago, the veterinary surgeons of the Falkland Islands realised that their cats, the cats on the island, who are mostly outdoor cats, were coming up negative for coronavirus, and so they began to make a quarantine of the entire island that any cat wanting to be.
Anybody wanting to bring a cat into the Falkland Islands had to produce a coronavirus negative result from the University of Glasgow, an antibody negative result to show that the cat would not infect the other cats of the island, and thus that island is entirely coronavirus. And therefore FIP free. And there are a number of islands around the world and who are coronavirus free, and I hope that you listening to me tonight will help me to realise a dream of making the whole world coronavirus and FIP free.
This is a still from a video that we've put up on YouTube. And here we have a cat about to try to get into this house, and you can see on the wall that coronavirus is banned. And I hope that you might download this film and run it in your practise waiting room television sets.
I do have a bit of a an error with this video in that the cat is clearly a stray cat, and in fact stray cats are very rarely coronavirus infected. I couldn't think of a way of of making him a pedigree cat or an ex-rescue shelter cat, and those are the cats that are most at risk of bringing coronavirus into a household. So let's go back and have a brief revision of how coronavirus is shared.
The Type 1 coronavirus is shed for about 2 to 3 months, and on the left of this photograph, we have a little cat who doesn't have coronavirus and below him charmingly we have his litter tray. It's rather crude this topic of conversation. I hope none of you are trying to scarf down a dinner while you're listening to this.
So here we have our lovely little cat and he gets coronavirus. Now, most coronavirus infection is subclinical. It's rare that a guardian will bring the cat to you for that.
The cat will have very transient, very mild, flu-like signs possibly. And may have some diarrhoea. Now, the diarrhoea can be a total spectrum.
It can go from being nothing that you hardly notice to actually being life endangering, and I have encountered cases that coronavirus has killed the cat, coronavirus enteritis has killed the cat, and Professor Anya Kier has published a paper on fatal coronavirus enteritis. So here we see our cat. I've got virus coming out in a sneeze, but virus is only shared very briefly in the saliva.
It's a matter of hours. That isn't a problem. Direct transmission is not a problem.
This is a problem of indirect transmission via the litter tray, via sharing litter trays, and you can see that I've put fluorescent green viruses in the litter tray. If only it were as easy to spot as that, of course it's invisible, and you have to send off a sample for RTPCR at a veterinary diagnostic laboratory of good repute. Virus shedding begins about 2 days post infection.
Serial conversion, the making of antibodies is unusually delayed in coronavirus. It's 18 to 21 days post infection, whereas in most viruses, it's around about a week. And in fact we know that coronavirus is one of the immunosuppressive viruses that does affect the immune response and especially seems to target the lymphocytes.
Because coronavirus in infected macrophages, monocytes release TNF alpha. Which causes lymphocyte apoptosis. So the cat goes on shedding virus, being quite happy unless he's one of the unlucky ones who gets FIP.
Then after, on average, it's 2 or 3 months, it's, that's about 65% of infected cats. They shed for about 2 to 3 months, it can be longer. And when we were working out the carrier status, we found that cats could stop shedding up to about 9 months.
And then the antibody titer goes down. But the cat's immunity is very short-lived, and it can be reinfected very, very quickly. So the key for preventing spread of infection or getting rid of infection rather with a mother cat handled is to find this moment between the cat getting rid of the coronavirus and being reinfected and isolating him from the litter trays of other infected cats.
In fact, today, a lady sent me a very brilliant idea where she had made some kind of boxes with little cat flaps that each cat could only operate with their own collar or their own microchip. So that they could only access their own cat literary, and I thought that was absolutely genius. And I'm very annoyed that I haven't thought of that.
I hadn't thought of it at all, and that I hadn't thought of it years and years ago. We've been trying to think of ways to, to get rid of this virus for years. So as I said, saliva infection isn't an important route for transmission, but this little kitten's taking no chances.
About 13% of type 1 coronavirus infected cats becomes a carrier, that means a persistently shedding cat. And these cats maintain a high coronavirus antibody tighter, and they maintain quite a steady level of coronavirus shedding in their faeces. And that can go on for years and years or even for life.
And we talked about them when we talked about the gastrointestinal symptom, sorry, signs as two webinars ago I think it was. So protractor in favour of farm machinery. Coronavirus and FIP is rarely a problem of outdoor free-ranging cats because they bury the faeces and the virus and then the, the whole thing is subject to the weather conditions.
So virus probably only lasts. A matter of days outdoors, whereas within a household it's protected by the constant sort of climate, the protein of the faeces and sometimes by the cat litter itself where so inside it can survive for about for up to 7 weeks and outdoor cats don't tend to go around sniffing each other's excreta the way dogs do. So, if this cat were to be shedding coronavirus, and she probably isn't because she's an outdoor cat, but if she were, it would soon be dead within a few days.
The, the virus, not the cat. The virus has evolved this, the carrier status to try to overcome that. And I believe that FIP is an anomaly.
It's not what the virus, if you like, intends to do. It tries to make the cat into a coronavirus carrier by decreasing the immune system, but in some cats it goes too far and kills the host, which is never a good idea. If you get invited somewhere, try to remember not to kill your host.
Never get invited back once you've done that. The major route of coronavirus transmission is indirect by sharing litter traits with the coronavirus infected cat. This litter here is the sawdust based one, the little compressed pellets of sawdust, and that's the worst possible kind of cat litter.
You can see how dusty it is, it tracks terribly. It has and it has absolutely no anti-Corronavirus activity. I've already mentioned that coronavirus can survive up to 7 weeks in dried-up cat litter.
So avoid the sharing of litter trays. Have at least one litter tray for every cat in the house. This is a still from the film that we made, the cartoon that I made with Francois Bageni, who's a wonderful cartoonist and veterinary surgeon.
And if you haven't watched it on YouTube already, please do watch it. And again, please download it and show it in your waiting room to educate the public about this virus. This virus thrives on ignorance and people not knowing about it until it's too late.
And here we see the cat who is sharing a litter tray in the cartoon with a coronavirus excreta, and in the stool you can see that the cat's burying his own faeces, and when he leaves the litter tray, you can see that there are virus particles, invisible virus particles on the dirt trapper mat and of course on his paws, and then when he grooms himself after going to the toilet. This is how he will ingest the virus, and in the film we have the virus going down and actually infecting intestinal villi. So let the cats go outdoors wherever it's safe to do so and wherever it's possible.
Toilet, this cat saying I prefer the garden. Now this cat does look like one of mine, but he isn't, and that unfortunately doesn't look like anything like my garden. Some people have managed to train their cats to use human toilet, and the use of covered litter tray can also prevent spread of infection.
Presumably, we haven't actually tested this. And if all else fails, get a dog like this. The sign says, I like to eat cat poop out of the litter tray.
Highly embarrassing, but there we go. So to summarise, avoid indirect coronavirus transmission by fomites by using a non-tracking cat litter. Cite the litter trays distantly from food and water bowls.
It's amazing how often people cite the litter trays right beside the food and water bowls. Use dirt trapper mats beside litter trays and vacuum and steam clean as often as possible. And this goes not just for homes.
And the rescue shelters, but also of course for the for the the practise hospital. This is a photograph from a veterinary practise hospital which was very much aware of coronavirus. It had a lot of FIP deaths, and you can see that they had separate brushes and shovels for every pen so that they would not be transmitting mites, infected form mites from one pen to another.
Oddly in the same hospital. I found this first of all, they were using the cat cat litter that sawdust pellets, so that was the worst choice, but they had the dustbin where they put the old cat litter right beside the clean one so that dust could come up over into the clean cat litter. And, and on the other side, bizarrely was the the dry cat food.
When I pointed it out to them, they said, oh, you know, do like Homer Simpson would say, it's perfectly obvious. To an outsider, but it's not so obvious when that's what you're used to doing. And you as a veterinary surgeon are highly trained in in.
My great barrier nursing, and remember that our clients aren't. You may well have to actually go and visit their house or their cattery and see what they're doing just to spot odd odd things that may be doing foolishly. And, and that way you can stop disease transmission just by pure common sense.
Now, this is some information that I haven't yet published. At Glasgow we did an in vitro experiment where we took a number of cat litters, more than the 5 I've got listed here, and we mixed them up with coronavirus and put them on trays of, of cell culture, and you can see a couple of trees on the left. And that way we were able to measure the amount of virus.
And what we found to our surprise was that a number of commercially available cat litters did have antiviral activity, or at least They, they may not have antiviral activity as such in that they're not like a disinfectant that bleaches it, but they may simply glom onto the virus. They may simply be attaching the virus because what we found was that the bentonite based cat litters, the Fuller's earth cat litters, fared the best. The sawdust-based cat litter, as I've already mentioned, had no antiviral activity at all.
However, when we use bentonite-based litters in the field, they are unable to completely prevent coronavirus transmission in a household. We did a study of two households in Denmark. Household H and household M and L.
And we looked at 4 cat litters within these households, and what I have here is the 2 households and the different cat litters indicated by each column. The red indicate the percentage of cats who were positive at each testing on each litter. So you can see in household age, it's about 50/50 on litter H on litter A .
Almost 50% of the cat's samples were positive and just over 50% were negative. When the cats were changed on to litter X. It the number of positive samples was lower.
Onto littery and back up again at letter A, the control litter back up again. These were all bentonite base litters and then again this was a crossover study so that the cats were acting as their own controls back onto litter H X, and the percentage fell. And you can see a similar sort of pattern in household L.
But the the statistical analysis showed that this Wasn't statistically significant. It's about, about a 1 in 8 chance that this would just happen by chance. So we need to do further tests on these.
In the same households, we looked at reinfection of negative cats. So for example, on letter A, 35 of the samples. Remained negative.
And 25%, 25 samples became positive, whereas on litter X 16 or 70% remained negative. And 30% or 7 became positive, and you can see again in household age. The sorry, in the second household with catheter B is the control.
Again, there was a fall in the number of cats that became infected while that litter was being used, but you can see in the right hand column the P values, which is a measure of the statistical significance, but this was not statistically significant because you're looking for P to be less than 0.05. So it appears that this could be by chance, although If it's happening by chance, it's certainly happening quite often.
It seems rather strange, but we do need to do more work on this, and you're probably wondering, well, what is this wonderful letter X? And it's Dr. Elsie's catarract.
The other doctor. Elsie's don't work the same. It's catarract that was letter X.
Another litter of interest is the world's best cat litter, which has moderate anti-C coronavirus activity and very good non-tracking, but we haven't managed to do a crossover study in the field with that litter yet, and we're interested in recruiting households of coronavirus infected cats. To do more of these crossover studies. We do know that they do not abrogate.
They do not totally prevent coronavirus transmission, so they cannot be used on their own. They can only be used in conjunction with good hygiene and quarantine and so on. So I will be submitting a paper on this very shortly.
Coronavirus measurement, and the little kittens saying, that's not what I meant when I told them to to measure virus load. And denying that it's one of his damn humans, and just think that virus, sorry, that day. That poop con contains billions of particles of, of coronavirus.
So some of you will be using real-time PCR for coronavirus. Detection and what that involves is the primers and probe. We make a copy a DNA copy of the RNA virus and then we use matching pieces of DNA, which we call primers.
And in addition to in in old fashioned PCR you didn't use a probe. So on this one, we have to use the probe as well. And the probe is attached to a reporter.
Sort of chemical, sometimes a bit fluorescent, and a quencher. And when the PCR and elongates and and is amplifying, it breaks off the probe and the reporter becomes detectable by a computer and the computer then gives you a line like this. And, and this is an actual computer printout of, sorry, a screen capture of a PCR that I actually did.
Reputable labs should be using duplicates or triplicates on every single sample because this technique is a bit Not flaky, but it's, it's not that straightforward, so you you should make sure that your laboratory is using duplicates, triplicates, or better still, even quadruplicates. And what we're looking for is for the lines to overlap for each individual sample, and then you know that it's a real result and not a spurious one. And at Glasgow, if, if the lines aren't really closely overlapping, we will repeat the whole the whole reaction again to to see what the true result is.
As the virus becomes less, it becomes more difficult to get that sort of close overlap. If you look to the right, that's a sample with less coronavirus in it. Now what's so counterintuitive about this is that in the samples with more virus in them.
The reporter comes out more quickly. So you have a lower CT meaning more virus. And that always takes me ages to get my head around.
It's counterintuitive. You expect a higher report to mean more virus, but it's the opposite in real-time PCR. Just for, I, I'm sure you very soon get used to interpreting the CT results when you're dealing with the laboratory regularly.
Older cats shed less coronavirus than the younger cats, and the kittens shed the most. This is a cat whose guardian wants him to remain anonymous, so we'll call him Spider, that's not his real name. And yes, he did appear on my gingival stomatitis film because he had gingival stomatitis and is a coronavirus shatter.
And these are the real results of spider over a period of more than a year from 2007 to 2008, and we're looking at his coronavirus CT on the left, and just I put in a trend line, it shows that gradually shedding less and less virus. In fact, that's a rather old . Graph.
We've we've now been looking at spider for 5 years, and he stopped after 5 years, he stopped shedding virus, which was quite amazing and most carriers go on for absolutely life. Send a faecal test to the laboratory only once a month to monitor coronavirus shedding. My colleagues in Zurich seem to want 33 samples one a day for 3 days, and I have no idea why that is.
I, I, I don't find that at all helpful. You only need it once a month and you can only, you can use the regular pulse. You don't need to use any kind of RNA preservative or ice or anything, just Put it in a very a robust container, please, because we don't like getting burst samples and being stung out at the laboratory, so robust proper containers well labelled with the cat's name and the date, and just put it in the ordinary mail and good luck to the busman.
OK, so here's another silly word from the Oxford dictionary. Prodigal, to poke a to poke a sea bird. You remember if you were with me from the very first of this series of lectures, that 71% of cats with FIP were pedigree, in the Norris publication, and in my own work, 56%.
So we're looking at this being a problem mainly of pedigree kittens because at least 50% of cats with FIP are less than 2 years old. And unfortunately what we're encountering is a kind of ostrich head in the sand attitude to coronavirus and FIP. They don't want to know.
Some of the myths that they have are why bother all breeders cats are infected. Well, why bother? First of all, because they can be sued under the Sale of Goods Act for selling kittens that are not fit for purpose, and there have been several successful litigations in the UK and in Australia and other countries against breeders.
Secondly, the RSPCA. Has already prosecuted a breeder and removed all her cats and kittens because FIP in the kittens is preventable by early weaning and isolation. And in fact, I had an RSPCA inspector email me today where he wants to close down a breeder who has .
So a disgraceful number of kittens have died of FIP. In fact, he, he said it was about 30 kittens have died of FIP. There's also A Facebook page and website for cat bad cat breeders, so that you can make it very public and when you experience this, so that you can just prevent people buying from really bad cat breeders.
And what, what I want to see happen is coronavirus awareness and coronavirus testing among cat breeders, so that when they have their FELV and FIV tests annually, which most of them do, even though they have almost no risk of getting those infections. I, I want to see coronavirus antibodies added to that so that we can get awareness happening, we can get rid of coronavirus from the cats, and we can get coronavirus free kittens for people who want pedigree kittens instead of heartache, high veterinary bills. And just complete misery all around.
When you're vaccinating kittens, just doing the routine vaccine, I want to point you to some of the warning signs that you may be dealing with coronavirus infected kittens. One is uneven litter sizes, and this is a cat litter. These are siblings, and you're probably thinking, well, the poor wee runt in the middle.
Would die of FIP, and you'd be right, he did, but it was the one on the left who died first. She developed wet FIP, and the little guy in the middle developed non-effusive FIP, and the only survivor was the one on the right. And compare them to a litter of coronavirus free kittens, who tend to be pretty much the same size.
OK, male kittens are a little bit bigger than female kittens, but they're, you can see these two on the right, they're, they're lively, they're similar sizes. And they're just healthier looking. Check history.
Is there any history of diarrhoea, especially around 45, up to 7 weeks of age when maternally derived antibody is waning? Is there any history of upper respiratory tract signs? And can you see any third eyelid protrusion?
And this little cat here, who looks pedigree but actually was from a rescue shelter. It has very slightly protruding third eyelids, and it can be quite subtle, as you can see with this kitten, and he did actually go on to die of non-invasive FIP after a booster vaccine as an adult cat. And protruding third eyelids, of course, are usually a sign of an infection in the intestine, may not necessarily be coronavirus, but coronavirus is common.
So if you see that, if you see protruding third eyelids, there's quite a fair chance that the, the cat is coronavirus infected. So to early wean and isolate, you prepare the kitchen room and you remove all the cats and kittens a week before putting the queen in. You disinfect the room as far as possible using sodium chloride or bleach, sorry, sodium chloride, bleach or steam or both, and you dedicate litter trays, food, and water bowls to this room.
Disinfect them, put them in, the dishwasher at 60 degrees to kill the virus, and then you introduce the queen before she's due to give birth. You have to train your client about barrier nursing kittens to the kitchen room and to deal with them before the older cats or other cats to clean their hands and especially to have different shoes or slippers that are dedicated to that room and perhaps coveralls as well. One breeder that I visited thought she was isolating the kittens by putting them in this wire pen where of course 4 mites could easily blow into it.
So again, as I mentioned, you may have to actually visit the household to check on what they're doing because sometimes they do some pretty strange things. It's a good idea to find out if the queen is infected. So if she is, she can stay with the kit, sorry, if she's uninfected, if her teacher is 0 for coronavirus antibodies, and her her faeces are negative.
And She can stay with her kittens. However, if she's shedding coronavirus, then she should be taken out when the kittens are about 567 weeks old and and and the kittens removed to a clean room. Remember that this is all happening during that very short window when we can socialise kittens between 2 to 7 weeks of age, and you don't want to rear coronavirus free kittens for them just to just to be rejected because of behavioural problems.
So it's imperative that the kittens are socialised and then test the coronavirus test the kittens for coronavirus antibodies at at least 10 weeks of age. To ensure that the earlying and isolation has worked. This is just a graph showing the the fall of maternally derived antibodies and then how the serial conversion doesn't reliably occur to at least 10 weeks of age.
The serro positive cat kittens are in the green, er negative in white. You can actually see that in my work, it looked like they weren't having protection from about 4 weeks of age. And in Zurich, they had similar results of of MDA.
Reducing quite quickly. And the imitter they derived antibodies. At virus.com, we're trying to make people very much aware of the risk of buying coronavirus infected pedigree kittens, and we've got a number of posters that I would really love for you to to choose one, download and print it off and put it in your waiting room, please.
And we actually have them in a number of designs and in a number of languages, people are stepping forward and volunteering. To translate them, 11 lady translated a poster into Thai, another into Afrikaans. So, it's just fantastic.
We're really hoping to get the message out there, and I hope that you will help with that. And I do have a link in the notes to these posters, and I'm hoping to be adding more posters all the time. I'm grateful to Maria Boni, who sponsored the design of the posters.
So we've gone through most of this. I haven't talked much about building design and cat numbers. We do know that the more cats there are in the household, the more likely FIP is to occur, and the number goes up exponentially because of things like .
Like concurrent infections and stress, cats don't like to be in large numbers of of cats. So avoid immunosuppression and stress. This is from a paper by Doctor Peterson where cats were put into a shelter and they were tested for coronavirus at the beginning of of going into the shelter, the entry, which is the green column, and one week later in the yellow column, so there are column pairs for each of the cats tested at entry and a week later.
And you can see that for most cats after a week they're shedding very much more coronavirus because of the stress of going into the shelter, and I would think that the 4th cat from the left was a very severe risk of developing FIP because of the sheer amount of virus that he was beginning to shed. One theory is that the more virus there is, the more like the mutation is to occur. But remember, in all other diseases, just the sheer amount of virus itself causes the disease.
For example, in parvovirus, if you get a very small dose, you well, if you're an animal, you become immune, if you get a very large dose, there's a much higher chance of dying. Doctor Reimer from Munich, Mexico, published a very interesting paper recently and actually documented some of the stresses that had occurred in the cats with FIP in their study. And you can see that routine vaccination.
I had preceded. The onset of FIP and this is something I encountered really very frequently, so I'm surprised that it was just 5th on their list. Because I, I do encounter it a lot, and I, I find it especially tragic when a kitten has survived right through to a year old, and then it's the booster at 11 year and a few months that that makes the cat go into FIP.
And one of the things that we can do as veterinary surgeons is identify these at-risk kittens or young cats. And coronavirus antibody test them before doing the vaccine, the booster vaccine, to see if it's safe to go ahead or not and also we can do that with any kind of elective procedures such as breeding or boarding or surgery. Or indeed introducing a new cat.
So these are ways that we can prevent FIP by judicious coronavirus antibody testing. Before, the stressful, whatever, rather than too late after the horse has bolted. And Doctor Reimer also noted that a number of these cats came from households with a higher, higher than normal housing density of cats, more than 3 cats, and behaviourists tell us that when there are 6 cats or more in a household, you start to get behavioural signs of stress, such as inappropriate elimination.
So avoid cat stress. Encouraged the cat to relax and take it easy. I'd like to talk a little bit about the FIP vaccine.
I'm very much aware that this isn't available in the countries of all of you who are listening to me, and I would really like to see it be introduced back in the days when Zos was Pfizer. I was well, nagging them to try to get it and apparently, the, oh, I've forgotten the name, the people who control the drugs in Britain were trying to get them to introduce it. But then when Zoeists took over, it all sort of fell apart again.
The FIP vaccine prevents 50 to 75% of FIP that would otherwise have developed if the cats were not vaccinated. So why is it a controversial vaccine? And shortly I'll be releasing on YouTube the truth about the FIP vaccine.
A brief history of it. It was developed by Jay Gerber of SmithKline Beecham. It's a temperature sensitive intranasal vaccine.
Previously it was called Primus cell, and it's now called ellocell FIP. The vaccine replicates in the cool temperatures of the nares, but not systemically. You can see with this heat photograph that the nose of this cat is very much colder than the rest of the head.
Frequently asked questions are, does the vaccine work? Could it cause FIP itself? Does the vaccine actually infect the cat and cause FIP?
And does it cause something called antibody dependent enhancement, and this is something which has plagued experimental vaccines for decades, antibody dependent enhancement. This was one of the early adverts for it. He, he, the cat survived the neighbor's BB gun, a Doberman, a garbage truck, falling asleep on a cat engine, and a fall off the roof.
It's a shame he wasn't vaccinated with prim yourself. Well, if he'd survived all those stresses. I don't think he would have developed FIP.
It's a bad day for any cat. So, Jay Gerber developed the vaccine, reported it back in 1990. This is Jay Gerber.
Actually I met him on my first visit to the United States, and I've never been to the states before, and I didn't know the the customs there. So when he said hello, I'm Jay Gerber, I didn't know whether to answer he I'm D Adie or Diana Addy, and I thankfully I, I realised his name was Jay, not just the initial, lovely chap, and this is Doctor Hans Lutz from Switzerland. Now when I was in the States, I was lucky enough to actually witness.
Doctor Luz and Doctor Luz presenting his results of his blinded trial to Doctor Gerber and Doctor Gerber doing the unblinding. And this is the graph that Dr. Luz had, but he didn't have the placebo and the vaccine what's the word legend on the side, because he didn't know which was which.
And If you just look at it like this, it's like, well, this hasn't done very well, has it? Along the bottom, you see the day post vaccine. And you can see that there are almost equal numbers of the black and the white bars, equal numbers of cats who developed FIP in the 300 days.
Since the vaccine at day 0. And what Doctor Lus did was he covered up this part to the left of 150 days. And revealed that after 150 days.
Most of the FIP deaths were in the black column. Only one in the white. Now, the, the significance of that was that if that was the placebo, it meant that the virus, sorry, that the vaccine had worked.
However, if it was the vaccine, it meant that the it meant that the the vaccine had made It had caused antibody dependent enhancement. It had caused more cats to develop FIP. So then Jay Gerber unblinded, Professor Lu, and showed that it was the placebo cats that had developed FIP.
And that after 150 days, there was only one loss to FIP, and Doctor Fair, who was the lead scientist on this project, went back to the stored samples from the cats who had developed FIP and found that in fact they were already viremic and they were already incubating FIP. And there's no way that a vaccine could have protected those cats. Vaccines are preventative, they're not cure.
This is an excerpt from Daniel affairs paper. And if I could just read out to you a little bit, although clinically healthy at the time of vaccination, retrospectively, some vaccines that later came down with FIP were found to be RTPCR positive for coronavirus in the plasma and showed changes in blood parameters consistent with the early stage of FIP. It is concluded that cats can protect.
That the vaccine can protect cats with no or low coronavirus antibody titers, and that in some cats, vaccine failure is probably due to preexisting infection. So a frigate, a boat that nobody cares about. So, how, these are the questions that people ask, does the vaccine work?
Could it cause FIP? Does it cause ADE? And the answers to that are, yes, the vaccine works.
No, it doesn't cause FEP and no, it doesn't cause ATE. And just that one Swiss study alone would seem to to answer all these questions conclusively. Antibody dependent enhancement is a laboratory phenomenon.
In my PhD, I showed that it, it was that it wasn't something that happened in the real world. If I could just read you an extract from one of my very early papers. I said there was no evidence that the enhanced disease which has been described after experimentally induced infection of sero positive cats exists in nature.
This is not a phenomenon that occurs in the real world, so it's, if you like, it's a non-w worry. To go back to Daniellafe's work, this is a table from her paper showing side effects in the vaccine group and the placebo group, so with things such as fatigue, diarrhoea, sneezing, and so on, and you can see that there's no appreciable difference between the two groups. They are just vague clinical signs that sometimes occur after any vaccine, and they really weren't very common.
So it has no significant side effects, it is safe. Have we got any other studies from the field? Well, indeed we do.
We have some from Nancy Reeves, Nancy Postorina Reeves. But you may say to me, Diane, didn't she work for SmithKline Beecham, and I would have to say yes, you're absolutely right, she did. So, I've met this lady, no reason to doubt her .
Her honesty at all. But you could say, well, she's got a vested interest. OK, you can say that.
And what she showed was, she, she vaccinated. 582 cats, 453 were available for follow-up, and the follow up was 541 days. 94% were alive at the end of the follow-up, and no cat died by FIP during the follow-up, although one did die afterwards.
And she published a second paper in feline practise, and in that study, here we have the overall mortality and the FIP mortality, . In next column along, the FIP vaccine cats, 254, the placebo cats, 246, and the P value on the right, as I mentioned, that's to do with statistical significance. And what you can see is that the FIP mortality was significantly less in the cats who had been vaccinated and that the P value was less than 0.05.
In other words, this was statistically significant and represents a 75% reduction in FIP mortality. Well, you might be thinking. Why on earth are so many opinion leaders opposed to this vaccine?
Well, there are a number of experimental infections, experimental trials of the vaccine that occurred back in the day, and this was one of them at Cornell. And they took strain FIPV 1146, which is the most virulent strain of coronavirus known to man or cat. And they squirted 10 to 3 tissue culture infected those 50s up the nose.
Of, of a bunch of unfortunate cats. And 4 out of 4 of the controls got FIP, and 4 out of 8 of the vaccinates were did not get FIP. In other words, they showed 50% protection.
OK. So, they did another trial. That was another bunch of cats.
What these cats did to offend these people, and again 8 out of 8 air control cats died and 10 out of 11. But if you look carefully, you will see that they had increased the dose of this incredibly virulent strain of virus. To 10 to 5, from 10 to 3 to 10 to 5, and to cut a long story short, They weren't happy that 10 out of 11 got FIP, and they carried on till they killed 21 out of 21 cats with 5.
10 to 5.5 TCID 50 of the virus. You'd almost think they wanted the virus, the vaccine to fail.
Just call me . Anomaly, a scientific term for what the So conclusions. Falo cell FIP protects coronavirus, naive cats from FIP.
It's a temperature sensitive intranasal vaccine. The first dose is at 16 weeks, and the 2nd 3 to 4 weeks later. This is too late for petty kittens who will be likely to be infected already and should be given to all cats and kittens entering rescue shelters or boarding catteries.
Rest or, or any kind of multi-ca risky situation. And they should have it before and if you're running a boarding cat tree in your practise, please introduce this vaccine before the cats come to you. So to summarise the this lecture, you can prevent susceptible cats encountering a feline coronavirus, good building design, avoiding draughts, avoiding tracking litters, excellent hygiene practises, quarantine.
My cat's grooming herself next to me. It's a funny sort of noises in the background. Sorry about that.
Kittens can be protected by early weaning and isolation. The vaccine cell FIP should be used, especially before going into multi-cat environments with coronavirus. And to prevent FIP and coronavirus positive cats, we can reduce the viral load, we can avoid stress.
I put nutrition question mark because remember cats are obligate carnivores, they need arginine, they need real meat, and some of the dry cat foods that we get are quite deficient in arginine. Doctor Maggs published a paper. Where the plasma arginine of the cats on a dry diet.
It fell repeatedly on, on the diet. So please join me in eradicating coronavirus and FIP by putting posters and videos in your waiting room, encourage your cat breeder clients to become coronavirus free. Now you're equipped to advise them how to do that and And Doctor Arielli at Duke University is a behavioural economist, and he found that the way to get poor people to save money was to actually put a a visible disc thing in their house so that people could see each time they'd saved.
And what we're going to try to do in the NFIP group, which is launching tomorrow. I make available certificates and stickers so that that breeders can virtue signal that they are coronavirus free to other cat breeders at cat shows and so on, and that will that will be the thing that will most encourage other breeders to start testing. And once we hit a level of probably just about 10%, a tipping point will occur, and then all the breeders will start to test.
And please educate your colleagues, your veterinary colleagues, because very sadly, it's a number of vets who are propagating some of these myths and and lies and and mistakes about coronavirus and FIP. I couldn't do my research without the cat guardians who give samples, and you people, you wonderful, wonderful vets who parcel up these disgusting packages of cat faeces and goodness knows what, and mail them to me. I really can't thank you enough.
I'm grateful to the sponsors of the cat litter project. And to the people at Glasgow who do the, the labour, and I do the oratory, I won't go through all their names. I think I've shown them before.
I'm really grateful to them. I'm grateful to the people at Webinar vet because they're so efficient and Anthony for hosting the series. And I'm sorry I haven't left you more time for questions, but I, I hope that you will, feel free to ask some questions before you go for a very funny cup of tea.
Thank you so much, Diane. That was really great. And we're really grateful for you as well for all of your hard work.
If anyone does have any questions, could you please pop them in the Q&A box at the bottom? I have a couple through already, Diane. What is the pathway mechanism of the protruding third eyelids?
I have no idea. That's a fantastic question. That really, it's amazing.
Why have I never thought of that? I'm going to find that out. Perfect.
I do have, I have another one. Is the FIP vaccine currently available in the UK? No, unfortunately, it's not.
I think we can apply for it, you know, we can apply for permission to bring it in with a special licence. From the group whose name I still can't remember. Oh gosh.
The senility is really starting. It's terrible. Don't worry.
Do you, do you know of anyone that's used the FIP vaccine in the UK so far? Yes, yes, I do. OK.
I, I wanted to ask myself, the vaccine, is it an annual? Vaccine. It is an annual vaccine, yes.
OK. I'll just give a couple more minutes just in case anyone else has any questions, and if anyone was interested, we do have all the notes, for this webinar, so it's available on the webinar vet website. I can't see any more coming in, Diane, so really it's just a, a big thank you.
That was an an excellent presentation. I've really enjoyed it. And we hope to see you back.
Thank you very much, Emily. It was a real pleasure and all the participants for giving up their evening or whatever time of day it is to, to come and and be here and thanks to people who are listening to an archive as well. I look forward to our next day jaunt into FYP.
That is a complete series, but I'm thinking I'll probably give an update and maybe when I've got more information. That would be brilliant, and I've got a few thank yous coming through as well. Brilliant webinar.
Thank you so much. And particularly thank you for your treatment advice for my cat. And that's from Sue and another one from Hilda saying thank you.
I have another one saying how effective is the vaccine. I think you did touch on that. Yeah, towards the end.
Preventable fraction is between 50 and 75%. So not 100% of cats protected, but, but really very high considering what a difficult, difficult. Virus this is to vaccinate against.
Yeah, and also considering that in, in the field there's very poor immunity. So it was a major challenge and I, I think, I think the people at Smith Cline Beecham did wonderfully well to develop it, and I'm just really sorry that my colleagues in ABCD don't agree with me about recommending this vaccine, and I'm in a minority and I think people just haven't considered the full picture, that the evidence from the field studies, as opposed to evidence from experimental studies. Yeah.
I just had one come through from Sue again, he said thank you for treatment advice for her cat. She's still alive 4 years on. It's lovely, thank you, Sue.
I know that's very nice. And another comment, excellent webinar. Thank you all the way from California.
Oh bless you. Thank you very much.