Kitten Eye infection

Farah, I understand that it must be very hard to get things where you are. Lysine is found in beans, cheese, yogurt, meat, milk, brewer’s yeast, wheat germ, and beef or ox heart. If you can get Lifa to eat any yoghurt or cheese (often cats love these), or sprinkle yeast over her food, or feed her ox heart, you will be helping her get lysine.

If things change, and you can use the internet to order, this is the website in the US where I sometimes order things from that I can’t get in New Zealand. It has Lyseine/lysine for cats: http://search.entirelypets.com/search#w=lyseine
But it would probably be cheaper to buy the human variety: http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Health-Personal-Care-Lysine-Nutritional-Supplements/zgbs/hpc/6940111011

Lysine or lyseine or L-lysine is an essential amino acid, that both humans and cats need. We cannot make it in our bodies so we have to get it in food (often meat or dairy products, such as beef heart or caseine in milk). You may be able to find it in a health store for humans, if there is such a thing around you.

It does have a scientific name but I don’t think anyone ever uses it, it is: 2,6-diaminohexanoic acid, alpha-epsilon-diaminocaproic acid.This website tells you more about it: http://www.drugs.com/npc/lysine.html

I wish you the very best, please keep in touch with us and tell us how you and your kitties are doing.

Hi, Farah. Glad to meet another Buffy fan; another TDKer, my friend Kate, who also lives in NZ (on the Kapiti coast) had a boy cat called Spike after Spike the vampire too! Cat people obviously have great taste! You are more than welcome to use Nuffy for a future cat, it would be great to know the name lives on. She was a lovely girl.

I wish I could help about the flu. Is it cat flu? If so, I’m afraid, if the mums and the kittens are unvaccinated, then it does take a toll on kittens. They can sometimes come through it if they have had enough to eat and are warm enough and their immune systems are up to it but otherwise, it is often a killer and I’m afraid the only solution is for the mother cats (and the kittens too, when they become old enough) to get their vaccinations regularly. But it could also be upper respiratory infections due to chronic viruses or just to being too cold. Very young kittens are not able to regulate their body temperatures until they are about six weeks or if they are older but sick, and they die of hypothermia very easily (they can also die of overheating). That’s why litters cuddle together with each other and their mums. They could also have bacterial infections that are causing the illness and need antibiotics. So it is almost impossible to give you a blanket answer on how to help the cats since there might be many different causes, physical and viral and bacterial, for their sickness. All I can say is that good food and shelter, if you are able in any way to help with that, and possibly lysine on their food, will help every cat to fight infection. (There are heaps of instructions on how to build simple shelters for feral cats on the internet, if that is ever something you could help with, just google it or come back here and we will find the links for you).
You probably know much better than me what you need in your cats’ first aid kit, it sounds like you have made a good start. Nutrical is always useful for sick cats and kittens, it is a high calorie paste that you can put on their mouth and they will lick it off even if they are not eating, it will keep them getting the food they need to survive. However, it probably has an expiry date on it once it’s opened, so you might not want to order that until you need it. Neosporin is an antibiotic ointment that seems to help a lot of cats and kittens in the US, I don’t have personal experience with it but it might be very useful. Perhaps you could talk to your friend’s father again about what you might need, but perhaps the best way is to buy things as you need them.
I wish I could help with the terrible sickness but I have no idea. Are you talking about indoor cats and kittens you live with or about cats who live outside and come to you for food? It is obviously something horrible and infectious, unless it
was maybe something poisonous or corrosive that they all ate. Were any of them able to get to a vet? Again I would ask your friend’s father but without being able to examine an animal and test for various problems, it would be almost impossible to say. I hope it never happens again, it sounds horrific.
You will never annoy us by coming here and asking for help with cats; we love them and we love people who try to help them. Unfortnately, we are not vets, just experienced cat owners, so there are loads of things we don’t know but if we can help, we will. Never be afraid to ask questions on here. And please take great care of yourself and don’t take any unnecessary risks ever, the cats of your area need you.

Farah, every reply you send makes me admire you more. You obviously take such great care of the cats, inside and out, building them houses and wanting to vaccinate them. I am afraid I do not think that you could order the vaccines without a veterinarian’s prescription but your friend’s father may be able to. When animals are stressed, and not as well fed or as generally healthy as they could be (the same as with people in battle zones or after natural disasters, such as earthquakes), and are scavenging for food from who knows where or what, and especially if other dead animals are around, and air and water are polluted with contaminants, then new and old diseases and sicknesses emerge very quickly and can spread like wildfire through a population that may never have had that sickness before (called ‘a naive population’ because they have no immunity) or may have known it in the past but it has been kept away by hygienic living conditions, good food, vaccinations and medical treatment. So I can understand new feline diseases emerging in Syria and where you live, where your societies are going through so much tragic disruption — but Saudi Arabia and the UAE as far as I know are very stable societies so it is hard to know why the disease should have spread there, unless there are large populations of stray and feral cats to spread it across the borders, or it can spread to other types of animals who can carry it.
This kind of information is very important and, if most of the vets in your country have closed up or left, you are possibly one of the very few people in your area collecting it, as with globalisation, such diseases can easily spread from country to country (and some animal diseases — though not usually feline diseases — can even eventually spread to humans. It is usually diseases from pigs, bats, birds and primates that are sometimes able to spread to humans.) Keep notes, if you can, and compare them with your friends, and one day you may write an important letter or article to a scientific or veterinary journal that helps scientists to work out what’s going on with these sicknesses and can one day help other cats.

Hi there! Thank you for taking in a stray kitten and giving it care 🙂
I had a very similar situation happen to a litter of kittens (the mama was a stray at a gas station). I took the mama in and a week later she had a litter of kittens. They must have been exposed to a herpes virus, probably from the mama cat. The two boy kittens were fine, one female kitten passed away and the other kitten (who eventually became my soulcat!) had a damaged eye from the virus. I took her to two different vets and both said her eye was fine and my hubby used to very lovingly tease her she had a zombie eye. Both vets said her eye was healing and she did have some sight from it. So I guess it depends on the extent of damage to the eye.

For now it sounds like you are doing the best you can do with your resources 🙂