Hello, I would be very grateful for any and all advice regarding testing for my new kitty.
My husband and I weren’t necessarily looking for a fourth kitty, but recently, we happened to see a kitten from a rescue group. He had such a nice personality, and had just recovered from surgery due to a badly shattered hip bone. The rescue vet said that the injury in his estimation was caused by a very hard kick to the kitten’s hip. He’s had a hard start to his life. We adopted him and very much want to give him a good permanent home. Right now, this new kitty is segregated from my other 3 cats, as we were waiting to find out his FeLV and FIV status. I recently took this kitty to my vet for the test, after waiting a month and a half from adopting him, to try to account for any incubation period for the FeLV, as well as waiting till he was old enough for the FIV test (he is now 6.5 mos old). My vet recommended a lab ELISA test for the initial screening. After much reading, I found out that FeLV regressive infections are pretty common, and ELISA and IFA do not detect regressive infections, whereas PCR can. Problem with the commercial lab PCR tests for FeLV is that so far, they has not been independently evaluated. After discussing this with my vet, he was fine with going with either test. Very happily, the IDEXX real-time PCR test came back negative for both FeLV and FIV. Initially my vet said that it would probably be good to also do a lab ELISA test, to see the results of that test as well, as he advised that it is still considered to be the major test for screening. I spoke to my vet again today, and now he says that he doesn’t think the additional test is necessary, but that no test is 100% accurate. I am rather confused, and also rather paranoid to boot because I had a really bad experience with FeLV more than a decade ago, when I didn’t know much at all about virus testing. Back then, I adopted a new kitten who turned out to be FeLV +, but by the time she had gotten sick and we found out about her status, she’d been exposed to my other cats, who then also got the virus and all died shortly thereafter, within a year. It was a HORRIFIC experience that still brings me to tears to this day when I remember what happened. I really feel for those of you whose kitties are suffering from this disease. I would like to take all precautions I can to prevent this from happening again. My current 3 adult kitties (5,6, and 7 years old) are healthy and are FeLV and FIV tested and negative. So my question is, do you think it would be good for me to get a lab (not the in-house) ELISA test in addition to the IDEXX real time PCR that was already done for this new kitty? Apologies for the long message, any suggestions/advice are greatly appreciated.
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