Prevalence of and Risk Factors for Feline

Data were gathered for 117 cats from 89 catteries at an international cat show to examine prevalence and risk factors for feline Tritrichomonas foetus and Giardia infection. Prevalence of T. foetus was 31 % among cats (36 out of 117) and catteries (28 out of 89) based on results of fecal smear examination (5 out of 36), fecal culture in modified Diamond’s medium (9 out of 36), fecal culture in In Pouch TF medium (20 out of 36), or PCR amplification of the ribosomal RNA gene from feces with T. foetus-specific primers (34 out of 36). Catteries in which T. foetus was identified were more likely to have had a recent history of diarrhea, historical diagnosis of coccidia infection in adult cats, and a decreased number of square feet of facility per cat. Evidence did not exist for the ongoing transmission of T. foetus by water, food, or contact with other species. Tritrichomonas foetus was recently identified as a cause of large-bowel diarrhea in domestic cats (6, 7, 10, 15, 16). Based on morphology and sequence identity of rRNA, feline T. foetus is indistinguishable from bovine venereal T. foetus and porcine enteric Tritrichomonas suis (1, 2, 3, 8, 11, 13, 14, 18). The origin of T. foetus and the prevalence of infected cats are unknown. We thus performed an epidemiological study of feline T. foetu