Hello, it's Anthony Chadwick from the webinar vets, welcoming you to Vet Chat, which is the UK's number one veterinary podcast. However, we're not going to do a podcast today. We have a buddy here, my CFO just wants to stand up and say hello, he's the chief feline officer at the webinar vet, but probably more importantly, we have Professor Danielle Gunmore who is professor of .
Feline medicine at Edinburgh University, and I think is, is also, I'm told one of the best impersonators of cats. During lectures, I was speaking to 3 students or or qualified vets actually who'd been a student of Danielle's and when I was talking about Danielle, they said she's a fantastic lecturer, but she does amazing cat sounds as well, so who knows during this podcast, because of course it's not a podcast, it's a podcast. Hopefully we may even hear, a few feline sounds as well, Danielle, great to, great to have you on the podcast.
You are one of my favourite vets in the whole world, and I'm so honoured to have you on. I remember, first meeting you cos I think we are of a similar vintage. At dermatology meetings where you were talking at that time a lot about mycobacterium.
Obviously one of the first people into that whole area. I know we, we'll maybe talk briefly about that, but obviously we also want to talk about coronavirus and FIP, and also dolphins, because of course you have a very famous husband. Is your husband more famous than you are?
No, you are very famous in the world. If you Google us, you get more hits from me. Oh well, I, I, I would only expect that as well, but Frank is a, a lovely man, but obviously doing fantastic work.
In dementia, but also in dolphins and donkeys, cats, as well as humans. And looking after me, because we've been together since fresh as week, first year, many, many, many, many years ago. Fantastic.
It's, well, do pass on my best wishes to Frank. It's always good to see him at the conferences. We do love ISFM's week, usually somewhere in the sun, even this, this year in Dublin, we had good weather, didn't we, on the whole?
We did, yeah, it was great and good beer. So. Danielle, tell me a little bit about what got you into feline medicine because you very quickly sort of, that was your place, wasn't it?
I, I, am I right in saying that you did a fab scholarship at Bristol? So yeah, give us a little bit of history, and there's buddies off, so we're OK. I was born into a very Philophile family.
My, my mother, my sister, are absolute devout Philophiles, and my first. Memories were of my feline companions, . So I was going to be a vet from the time I was like 4 or 5, and by the time I was about 9, I was going to be a cat vet, despite the fact that they didn't exist then.
But I was a bit it was all dogs and I was in Northern Ireland and you know, they really didn't do cats at all. Cats lived outside and Chased and ate mice, end of story. And other than, you know, people who had people who had cats in the dust when it's usually female and you're probably a witch.
Yeah yeah. And of course that would have been the time, I remember going to university in the late 80s and two of the great books were the BSADA canine, medicine and therapeutics and feline medicine and therapeutics, which I think if my memory serves me right, was Tim Griffith Jones, who was probably one of the first, if not the first to really take cuts seriously, certainly in the UK. Absolutely.
He was the 2nd Fab scholar. The first was Chris Gasker. But obviously Chris Gasser went on to do great things, but not staying with and Tim stayed with feline all the way through.
So I think he was the 2nd. Feline professor. The first one I think was John August in Texas A&M, possibly about the same time.
And of course both of them have retired now, which just leaves Sev Tasker and myself as professors of feline medicine in the world that are still working. We desperately need more people to want to to take the feline route. It's hard because the The advanced boards, you know, you can do equine on its own.
You can do sheep on its own. You can do cattle on its own, but it's companion animal medicine, despite the fact that an awful lot of people who say they're companion animal medics, they really don't know anything about cats, not as a bad thing. They've just never studied cats.
They've been at universities where they see very, very few. So I really think feline should be a separate, but I, I think it might get there because other specialties, I know this wasn't what we're gonna talk about, but, like surgery, you have to specialise in the wards in surgery. And then you do soft tissue and orthopaedics within that.
But most orthopods, don't want to do soft tissue surgery and soft tissue surgeon stuff. They don't want to do bones. So they are really fighting to make those two separate specialties.
And as the knowledge grows in each of these areas just the same way it has in people medicine, then there will be, you know, evidence there is enough to know. And hopefully we will get a feline specialty all the time because we used to have, I don't know if you remember the Royal College did, certificates and diplomas of feline medicine at one point. And it was, I think it was such an aggressive thing when they decided to bin them and align themselves, just go to so they stopped offering, diplomas and things.
It was you're supposed to take the, the European route. And European, maybe that could be a thing that comes out of Brexit. Yeah, I mean it, it was sad because I did feel I did a certificate in veterinary dermatology and the level was actually really high.
I'm not so sure some of these certificates that are coming out now from commercial companies are quite at the level that that that was at, you know, there was a great deal of detail needed even for the certificates and of course the diploma and comparative dermatology as well, which. You've got to do all species. That's where, that's where the the topic specific.
You've got to do the whole species. Yeah, I, I sort of fell in love with dermatology and part of that was also the Rha monologues that Danny Scott wrote in the 70s, which were all around dermatology. I was speaking to the RR CEO recently and.
Say, you know, what an amazing, I think it was two articles that he wrote that were almost the whole magazine and things and obviously he, he was able to distil cut dermatology knowledge into those two those two issues. I was lucky enough to to lecture with him a couple of times, yeah. Amazing man.
The founders of a different, specialties. They really were trailblazers, weren't they? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely so.
Talking a little bit about mycobacteria, where is that up to at the moment? Is that still a disease. It takes some of that, it takes still quite a lot of my bandwidth.
I've got a postdoc still working on improving diagnostics. And of course, I've had two fabulous PhD students, Connor O'Hallorhan, who's now doing a residency with us, and then, Jordan Mitchell, who is, he's doing, pathology residency in RBC. So good, good man, both of them, and they really moved the, the field on and Connor and I still do the companion animal mycobacteriosis, advice line.
Which takes up far too much time. We're gonna have to make it an online thing and ask people to to pay if they need extra, because it's just doing that on top of everything else. But people are getting better at recognising it and in more countries as well.
The, the big outbreak in raw food. Made that's I think what brought it to most people's attention. And that was obviously in in cats.
And then we have the big outbreak in the pack of hounds, and both of those outbreaks that they did help move on the science a lot. I think one of the problems is that if you're not aware of a condition, you're probably never gonna diagnose it and then of course it's very difficult to find the mycobacteria and culturally isn't it, so it's, it's one of those which we're surely missing as well. I think certainly a lot of older cats that they get it because people will just presume the cat's got cancer, whether it's through the lungs or you know in a cutaneous things that just go oh he's lumpy bumpy, he's old, it will be cancer and they get euthanized if they take histopaths, which of course is done, you know, ever more, then the pathologists have got good at saying.
Actually, these changes are very suggestive of mycobacterio mycobacteriosis and then either they say, do you want the ZN stain, which obviously, you know, is a rubbish stain, . And they put our address, so people contact us. And we've been able to do all the work based on the samples that everybody is generously given.
So anybody out there who has given us tissue, radiographs, CT, whatever, thank you. And if anyone's got any spare blood for any of those guys, we're still looking. And how successful is treatment now because of course we've improved it so much, so much.
So when I first started this work, honest, it was a cat I saw in my residency called Lucky McCulloch, Black Cat wasn't lucky. And, yeah, he was the one who started me on the journey, as they say, he had a monoarthri left elbow. And the surgeons went in to to get me a biopsy.
And of course in those days he didn't wear much protection or anything. And then his past came back with its mycobacterial and everyone went. And we did actually chop it in half and we had some for culture.
So we sent that to the culture and kind of like 3 months later, takes, it can take 6 months to grow. This one I think was 3 months, and it came back with growth pattern partway between mycobacterium tuberculosis and mycobacterium bovis, and they said, we don't know what this is. What they didn't know is it was myrote.
And which had been worked up in the 1930s by a guy called Wells, . And so I started gathering together all the cases that I could find that were similar. And then we published that 1920 cases and then that started, OK, like bacteria microte is a thing in cats.
But, treatment for for TB cases, used to be maybe 40% would go into, you know, resolution, remission, whatever you want to call it. Very few come out, . Well, now, certainly those days, I think it was.
It was 60% went into. Remission, but 20% of those fell back out again. So overall it was 40%.
Now, for TB we're looking at 80%, resolution and less than 10% coming back out. Fantastic. We probably, I'm I'm pretty sure we've got a webinar on this, but maybe we need to renew it at some point, Danielle, so maybe you get some of your co-workers working on it as well, because it's, it's an exciting.
Exciting area, . Obviously a a serious infection and like FIP that we're gonna talk about now I know another granu how why is it I'm into granulomatous disorders. But you know, keeping you very busy, I know there's been a big outbreak in Cyprus, tell us a little bit about what's been going on there and what the clinical signs and so on.
Well, my knowledge of this came about because a fabulous guy called Harropos, sorry, his first name is Harroampos, and I, I'm not very good at rolling my eyes with Harro. And he had said he was one of the founders of . A laboratory in Cyprus.
So he came to me. So he was brand new, literally the first week of him starting a senior, lectureship in clinical pathology. So he's still got this working with this lab in, in, in Cyprus.
And then he came to me with this data, and he said, I hear you know about FIP. Can I show you something? Because his area of research is actually, innate immunity, particularly, neutrophils and how neutrophils are working on nets, all that stuff.
And he said, what do you think of this? He said, since, End of the year, end of last year, we would, we will see maybe one or two cases a month we're diagnosed with FIP, but there's been a 40-fold increase. And we, we've mapped it, it started in Nicosia, and then you could see it sweep across the island.
You know, what do you think? And I just went. I think we might be in trouble.
And so what do we do? So I said, right, well, you know, let's start. And and so he's been, he's a force of nature, he's wonderful.
So he's part of the obviously the the the Cypriot group and they've been working on getting drugs in, to treat the cats. So they've got legal legal products to use and then, doing their epidemiology, . They've got people looking at, particularly on the EP which is so important, but he then got the samples, so the samples that had had RTPCR to confirm that they were FIP.
I then introduced him to, Christine to take Burkhart. She is one of our brilliant virologists, and she works with a lady called Amanda Waugh, and she does all the bioinformatics of the complex sequencing. And he said, well, What do you think?
And so Christine's specialty is coronavirus, virology. She particularly works on piggy coronaviruses, but if it's a coronavirus, she's more than happy to work on it. So they've sequenced the virus and it's absolutely terrifying.
They sequenced, what it is. It's a spine is type one, feline coronavirus, but the spike is a pan tropic canine spike. And of course, coronavirus is like to do this and type 1 feline corona and doggy corona have done this before.
That's how we have type 2 feline coronavirus. But this new one is monster, because normally to get FIP, you are infected with a feline coronavirus that replicates in your guts, and then just occasionally they will jump into a macrophage and whether or not that individual cat goes down with FIP 50% of the risk is its genetics, and we find certain breeds are predisposed. Sadly, the British short hair, it's about 60% of our Other FIP cases in the non-Cyprus counts are pedigree.
30% are British shorthair. About 17% are rag doll, and then about 7 or 8% are Maine Coon. So genetics plays a big role, but then it's that that coronavirus within the macrophage, it's got to replicate really fast.
So the macrophage has got to let it do that, and then it's got to have another mutation before it can start taking over the immune system. So there's a lot of steps to it, which means that in almost all cases of FIP, the virus within that cat, kitten, usually is a different sequence to any other cat that's got FIP. You get occasional hot strains, very small outbreaks where you might have a few cats within a household.
They're they're often very genetically related cats or within a rescue centre, but the virus never gets out. It just, it, they're not, they're not re resilient enough. But what we've got in these cypress cats is the sequence is identical.
There's one or two that have got just cat sequence where you would expect there is still feline coronavirus on the island. But then this monster, recombinant virus is clearly now the the dominant, coronavirus that's there in cats. It's clearly not killing all cats because they would have been scooping dead cats up in a barrel, but massive numbers have died because that 40-fold increase that was on cats that had had.
RTPCR confirmation. Cyprus is always it's the the island of the cats. They talk about having a million cats, .
They don't know the number, but so many strays, all of the the monasteries and the, but they all feed the cats. Everybody looks after the cats. So that the strays are all fed and there is so many.
And so many have died. Vet's registering on a a questionnaire that they have diagnosed cases, then, we were up at 10,000 cats. By a month or two ago.
It'll be more now. So, yeah, it's, it's horror. Well, not only is it the same sequence in almost all cases, so it must be directly transferred.
That hasn't been proven yet, but we have looked at immuno histochem in the cat's bowels, and you can see, masses of a virus. So there's way more virus in the colon of these cats than you would find with a cat that died of normal FIP. So the amount of virus being shed is much more, and the virus that's being shared is a horror.
It's got pantropic spike to it, so it can get through the cat much more. So for example, in normal FIP then only about on clinical exam alone, about 14% will show some kind of CNS changes. But with this, it's 28%.
If you look by his on the normal ones, it goes up to about 30%. So my guess is by histopath, you're probably getting up to 60%. So the the pantropic nature of it means it's crossing the blood brain barrier with great ease.
So Danielle, just on a sort of age and signalment, is this mainly young cats that are being affected or are they all ages? Really good question, Anthony, because in normal FIP, it's the vast majority are babies, usually less than 2 years of age. With these cats, it can be any age.
So yes, there's more younger cats on the island, but it does appear to be that the older cats haven't got an immunity. So, which is why older cats in here, we're not going to see them getting FIP because they've got a much stronger immune systems. But it seems that the the cats, whether it's their genetics or simply, I think they have not met this virus before.
And that's why their immune systems are going, OK, and they're getting sick. My impression, remembering my sort of training on on er coronavirus in in cats was that I, You would have, you know, if you, if you did teeters, you'd find many cats had a teeter for coronavirus, but of course they had the innate immunity to cope with that, so they didn't go down with it, and sometimes it may be that further on in life they would have some sort of something else that might be happening that would then. Make them, go FIP, you know, clinical signs and, and, obvious FIP disease.
But with this it sounds like, many, many, and, and that might be load of virus to actually just go down with disease right away. Obviously this whole new strain is, is much more pathogenic than perhaps er previous strains. And I think the, I think the lack of innate protection because they've not met, you know, you can imagine as if you're getting, you know, as you say in multica households, the vast majority of cats are going to be positive.
Even, you know, your chief feline, officer, he's likely to get if he goes outside, he's got a 50% chance of being coronavirus antibody positive just because he's gonna scrabble in the soil, he's gonna meet coronaviruses. So the presence of immune response to coronavirus is. It doesn't mean anything by way of diagnostics, but of course it does mean something by way of protection.
The protection doesn't last long, so that antibody dies off and then they can get reinfected. So, you know, Single exposure isn't going to protect you for very long, but it will give you something. And you can imagine if you're getting waves of exposure, then you get that that protection and you're absolutely right.
Cats that got infected when they were much younger, it can hide, typically in the brain, and then when the elderly immunosuppressed, it can come back out and we do see it in. A small number of of elderly cats do do go down with it too. We're not looking at that scenario with with this new, with this new, I shouldn't call it a strain.
It's it's a variant. Yeah. Obviously, you know, I've been a vet for over 30 years and we've been talking about FIP vaccines for decades.
People have brought them out, they've not been terribly effective. We've then had of course a coronavirus pandemic in the human population. And of course, you know, unlimited resource were put into that and we had a back seat within a year, which was a, you know, an amazing story, an amazing achievement.
Will some of that benefit us in creating a, a vaccine, you know, particularly for these Cypriot cats, but perhaps er for more of the worldwide feline population as well. We desperately need it, and I cannot believe that. Of, you know, of the different, farmer that have human sides and animal sides, they're not going to be going, oh, we've got this MRNA vaccine and people aren't needing it so much for for COVID protection.
There's this outbreak in cats and it looks like it's spreading. It's already in Britain, . Probably in in Greece, potentially in other countries call from Croatia.
It could just be that they are increasing numbers that go up and down anyway. But why wouldn't this thing get moved around? So we desperately need a vaccine.
Certainly I've had two small companies contact me. And what I've done, as soon as this outbreak became obvious, what I did was reach out to all of my colleagues around the globe that also work on FIP because I needed to make sure that they knew what we're dealing with. They were desperate to know what we were dealing with.
And so we put together and the guardianship of of of Drew Wagner, who used to be Africa. Scientific chair still on, on, on the board, and Vicky Thier, they, they've been brilliant, and we've pulled everybody in, and they've called it the centre of excellence for what I wanted was to, we've got a really small group of researchers around the world that can want to do this work. There's only a very limited resource.
We needed to make sure nobody is duplicating work. That's just crazy. We some either we work side by side, or if we can do this and make a deeper understanding, then that's great.
But what we mustn't do is, is this, and just we we needed to share knowledge. Have you tried this before? Yes, but it didn't work.
So, so don't waste your time on that. So, and then we've got within that, we've got different groups that have got an epidemiology group. We've got the treatments group, which is me, and I really must get some work done on that.
we've got the vaccines group, sequencing is Christine, of course, and Gary Whittaker, who's in the US, and then Greg Dean is heading up the vaccines. So people who approached me about vaccines, I'm putting them to him so that he can gather together all of the people, and certainly, I know that big pharma have are talking to him as well. One of the small companies that approached me, I thought was really interesting.
They're working on a mucosal vaccine. And Yes, as routinely, we're, we're gonna want parental vaccines, but. Whether there's funding for it, what the what the stray cats need is a mucosal vaccine.
Yeah, you think about how rabies is being cleared from France. They did it by baiting the foxes with yeah, and so ultimately that is what we need. But the immunology of these cats is different.
So we've got somebody work a group, a group working on epidemiology. We've got the virology. And then with myself and others, we want to work on the immunology because say the response to treatment of normal cats versus the FO 23, which is what we've called it, we named it rather than calling it the the Cypriot variant or anything like that.
That's wrong the same way as calling things the the Beijing or the or the or the London or. Exactly. It gets things all confused, much better.
So we named it the same way, and we didn't call it FIP 23 because or FIPV23 because it's not truly an FIPV because as we think of FIPVs, they're not usually transmissible, whereas it's the It's it's the it's the feline enteric coronavirus that are, but they're not, they don't make you sick. So it's feline coronavirus 23, hence we called it FOV 23. Maybe someone will rename it, but I think as we're on the ground, we got the first paper.
So I think we can call it FO 23, and it takes the Cyprus out of its name, which we all agree is really important. And have has Cyprus sort of instigated any quarantine or isolation, in other words, cats not going out of the island, or is that, is that certainly the vets there are telling people not to take the cats away. There are two big army bases because of course, you know, you've got the occupied, occupied zone, etc.
And they can bring their animals backwards and forwards. They do, they've got their families that they want to keep their pets with them. .
What we've tried to do is put the message out there. We've been speaking to the to the government by way of APHA we've been, and I know that, you know, we've spoken to people as we feed the information up. They know what we want that we want to have it that cats can't come into the country.
As a minimum with looking for antibodies. The problem is that it it that's in one study, it wasn't a big study, it's 83 cats if I remember rightly, all from high risk situations. I think 79% had antibodies, so you're still going to miss 20%.
If you look for . Sorry, excuse the crumpling a paper 2 cats, I said, yeah, 78% were antibody positive, whereas 71% were shedding in at least one of 3, sorry, one of 4 faecal samples that were collected. Because this is the worry that a lot of people.
Go to Cyprus, see a lot of stray cats, take a fancy to one particular one, and they bring it home to the UK don't they, and obviously other countries, so there is this worry, isn't there, that this will, . We've already got one in Britain from this route because what people. They'll set up a rescue centre in in Britain, and you can simply take a van over and fill it with with cats dogs from Cyprus because they're desperate for rehoming and obviously there's only so many people on on Cyprus that that can take them and then they're brought here, and rehomed from here.
And that is how the world so we've been monitoring all the ones that we hear about. So far, there's the one cat we have confirmed was FO 23. The owner has been amazing, treating at really high levels with high level GS to try and make sure that we've stopped that cat shedding and hopefully she's in resolution, but finance really became a problem and she was a feral, you know, the stress on this little cat.
Of her being of being forced to eat the food that's contaminated. And then, you know, of being regularly scooped into a box and take to the vet for blood sampling. That's so stressful for her.
. It ultimately it became how much more damage are we doing this little cat by trying to monitor her, and by forcing her to she won't take gabapentin, etc. Because she really hates food contaminated, but she's had to take a food contaminated with GS and we've had to prioritise that. So.
She has stopped treatment now. . Her AGP was was back to normal, but slow to respond, very slow to respond.
Perhaps talk to us a little bit about treatment because obviously Bobra have kindly sponsored this podcast podcast. Podcast. And.
I, I think there are some sort of legal reasons we have to be careful how we, we talk about it cos er and you can perhaps explain that, but this has been a real lifesaver for. You know, cats not just from this? Yeah, so we're not allowed to, we're not allowed to, to advertise people who who reformulate the reformulation company, so we can say thank you for sponsoring the webinar.
I'm not supposed to say that podcast, sorry, podcast. I can't see how I can talk about this without saying the name of the drug, so I can say the name of the drug, and it's, it's just a generic name, which is GS 44, and then we've got rendezir. So that Nick Bova responded to the needs of everybody here and Australia.
To produce antivirals when no other country was doing it was amazing. And cats' lives, hasn't it? Absolutely, and legally because the illegals started coming out of China, but the amount of drug in them.
You don't know. Weirdly, because some of them have been, assessed some of them can have nothing, and others can have twice as much as they actually say they've got, which is like, why would you do that? It's to show that that particular version is, that particular supplier.
That one really works and then they can call the market. We think that must have been why. So getting the legal products.
Before everybody else. I must admit it did feel quite good but for once we were ahead of Americans. But the point is that cats all the way around the world, they need these drugs.
And they, they, they are expensive, and in some countries, a lot of countries, that is a real limiting problem. So not that many cases in Cyprus have been treated with these. Yeah.
But there is a liquid version now, and that makes it cheaper and makes it much easier to get into the cats. And hot off the press, and we have to validate it. It looks to be much better absorbed, which just makes sense.
You know, if you're not absorbing a whole tablet, you're, it's already liquefied. Cats have got such small bowels, such short bowels. I got the, the bowel probably effectively as well, is it.
Yes, exactly. It's just much easier to get it in as well. So that is brilliant and it's reduced the costs as well.
So if we hadn't got these, I, I was thinking about this a lot because I, I lost my two elderly cats, . And then, sorry, I still have one elderly cat. She, she was 21 and she was really, you know, really lonely.
And I, I have to have another cat because we're going to lose her very soon. She's such a sociable girl. So I Got a kitten who was from the same line as my old boy because my old boy was an old Maine Coon, but I Rescued from the hospital.
And he was amazing when when my back when and I spent, you know, 6 months at home just lying on my back. He just stayed with me the whole time. And, Frank always said he could tell what my pain scores were just by looking at at Mort's face.
And if I had a spasm, I'd go like this, and he would just put because his head was here and his paw was here. If I had a spasm, he would just gently and purr really deeply. Hm.
Oh such an amazing cat. So I had an opportunity to get one of his great, great, great, great. So I got him and then I was desperate that because he lost 6 months of his kitten hood nursing my old lady when she went to 21, I thought I really want him to have some kitten hood and my best chance of that is a cat who's closely related to him because then they're much more likely to get on and another kitten.
And the two are wonderful together and the ginger tabby swirls with the brown tabby and white when they're doing their play and stuff and it's wonderful to see. But this was before we had the legal treatment. And I spent so much time thinking what would I do?
If one of these boys got FIP, what would I do? And when you know it's illegal, when the VMD in some country then in America, they're not being, you know, the vets are quite comfortable saying that they're using the illegal stuff, but we can't do that. And so, yeah, I was so pleased and you know you've obviously analysed it and particularly the liquid palatability, increased absorbance really pleased with it.
Because we're going, we're doing therapeutic drug monitoring. So we're a fabulous guy, Steve Cook approached me and he said, would I be interested in being able to measure the actual level of GS in cat blood? And I looked at him and went, Of course I would.
And he said, Well, I can do it for you. And I went, how much is it gonna cost me? He said, I don't know.
Should we do some for free and see what we get? I went, Give me an idea how many. He said, Well, I don't know, should we say 300?
I think he must have done about 3000 and. And what's amazing, the dose you give them really doesn't correlate to how much is in the blood. Some cats are incredibly poor absorbers, and we're having to get 30 megs per cake.
Others pee it out really, really quickly. And so you need more frequentries dosing and just treating on a 10 mg per kg once a day or twice a day, you really don't know what you're getting. Now, it may well be that there's an intermediate metabolite with a longer half-life.
And that might be part of the reason why even on the dosage system that we've got, about 85%, you know, so paper Sam published that we all had a hand in, but Sam Taylor, what a Herculean task that was. She is, she is amazing. I am so proud to be able to call her a friend.
And she, she showed that in that over 300 normal FIPs from all around the world. About 85% do really well. At the dosing system we've got.
So clearly we don't need to go up for most cats, but the ones that don't do well, a lot of those are CMS cases, etc. And it's going to be that they're not they're absorbing really poorly or they're peeing it all out, and particularly when you're on a high dose, particularly for a CNS case, you're going to be on a really high dose. And the problem with that if they're a fast excreta, there's a An increased risk of stones in the bladder caused by this drug.
Now there's only been 6 cases reported so far. They were in the US, I think one was Brazil. They were all on illegal high dose.
We have not seen any on the, the legal products that we have here. What, what we are doing, we what we are doing is we are monitoring the urine. And certainly on the little cat who came in from Cyprus because we've had to go so high with her, we can find GS crystals in her urine, no stones, but we have got crystals.
So that's an important thing to monitor if you're on these high doses. It's obviously fascinating, you know, worrying at the same time, obviously. We hope that it doesn't come into the UK in any great extent.
But it, it's certainly, I've really appreciated the time to find out about this and for vets in the UK and further afield, obviously we may even have a couple of Cypriot vets listening into the podcast when it goes out. I hope you guys are doing an amazing job. So it's, it's so important that people are just aware of it because obviously if they start to see an issue.
Whichever part of the world there from then we really need to to jump on this and and get in contact with you as soon as possible. Yeah, because we need samples and we need to start sequencing wherever you are in the world we can sort it. What we can do at the end of the podcast, you know, in the note, if, if you want to leave a contact details, then people can obviously get in touch, but .
Listen, thank you so much. I know how busy you are, I always appreciate and enjoy talking to you and . This has been really good for me because again, you know, it's a, it's a fast moving situation so to be up to date with it is is really important.
Thanks so much, Danielle. You're very welcome, Anthony, thank thank you for asking. It's, it's taking a lot of time, but it is so important and the group of people all over the world that are really throwing themselves at this and trying to sort it at speed.
They are amazing. So a huge thank you to everybody who is trying to help and for you and to Bova for sponsoring this podcast. And you didn't ask me about dementia, so I didn't get a chance to wow.
We'll have to talk about dolphins and donkeys and dementia at another time, but I do pass on my best wishes to Frank and of course to your two, Maine Coons at home as well. Yeah, so that's Brewer and McDuff. Macduff, and in fact I was to finish I we've been very fortunate and I believe it's coming to Scotland.
We've had Macbeth. In a warehouse in Liverpool at the moment that I saw. I heard it's brilliant.
With with Ralph, Ray Hines in it, and it's been really good, so if you get a chance to see it, Leon McDuff so to speak. Yeah, it's Leon MacDuff. It means lead on, but the actual words I think are Leon.
And my cats aren't named for that. They're named after Scotch with Scotch malt, of course. Yes, I know you love your scotch malts as well.
That's maybe another podcast, we can do that. Oh, it's wonderful to see you. Thank you so much for asking to do this.
Thank you, Danielle. Thanks everyone for listening and hopefully you found this as interesting as I have and hopefully we'll see you on our podcast, podcast or webinar very soon. Take care, bye bye.
Take care guys, bye.
