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Treatment

If this disease is caught early, your cat will more than likely be treated with antibiotics and sent home. Your veterinarian will prescribe either a standard course, or a long course of antibiotics for your cat, depending on the severity of the infection. If anemia is also present you may need to go with a course of steroid therapy. In most cases, only severely anemic, or very ill and listless cats will be hospitalized. Fluid therapy, and possibly even blood transfusions, will be necessary to stabilize your cat if the condition has progressed to a severe stage. Left untreated, this disease can have fatal results – 30 percent of cats with the M. haemofelis infection will die due to complications of infection.

Living and Management

Your cat will need to be checked by your veterinarian for progress within a week of treatment, when a red blood cell count will be performed to examine for mycoplasma levels. An infected cat can remain a carrier of the disease even after complete recovery, and while the recovered cat may infect other cats, a recovered cat will only seldom have a relapse of the disease. If you have other cats in the home, you will need to monitor them for possible symptoms and act quickly if they do appear.

The condition or disease described in this article can affect both dogs and cats (though it is not communicable between the two species). If you would like to learn more about how this disease affects dogs, please visit this page in the PetMD Pet Health Library.