Kitty asthma/allergies

Our 10/11 yo cat Fred had to spend the day at the hospital with an URI. He got 2 injections (antibiotic and bronchial medicine) and will be on medication for the next 10 days as well.

He is our sickly cat.....we can't open our windows when the weather gets nice because Fred will invariably end up with a URI. This is the 2nd time this year he has ended up at the hospital getting pumped up with medicine.

So, the vet and I talked today and it appears that Fred has asthma and allegies. When his allegies get really intense, it turns to a URI very quickly. He has trouble breathing and his right eye runs constantly. He doesn't lose his appetite though....if that ever happened I would swear he was on his deathbed.

So, have any of you have experience with asthma/allergies in cats?

It seems like all of my kitties have allergies to some degree. Hannah has continual respiratory problems related to herpes, so we're always watching her. My vet recommended giving her a daily dose of an antihistamine. He recommended 1/4 to 1/2 of a 10 mg. Claritin. We give the Wal-Mart brand of loratadine. The pills dissolve in water, so I add a couple of teaspoons of water to her wet food and mix it all together. She also gets L-Lysine daily which helps. For the Lysine, on good days she gets 250mg twice a day. On rough days, she gets 500mg twice a day. I use the powdered kind from either a health food store or I buy it online. You can get the pills in the supplement section at the store, grind between two spoons, and add to food. It's the easiest way to get meds down.

I have one cat with severe allergies, and another we think has asthma.
My cat with allergies (Mr Grey) however does not have any respiratory symptoms. His symptoms are mostly skin related and he also gets lip ulcers, and GI inflammation.

We think my other cat Church has asthma though... He had recurring URIs as a kitten and my vet suspected he had feline herpes. However he "grew out of it"--he stopped having the URIs as he grew up and hasn't had one since he was about 6-7 months old. He is 3 now. Last year I took him to be screened to participate in a blood donor program. Part of the screening is an exam by a vet at the clinic that has the problem. They take the cat back to see the vet so I didn't actually get to talk to them, but the tech brought him out and said he had a heart murmur so he couldn't participate. I was pretty shocked. I took him to my regular vet and she listened very carefully but could not hear any murmur at all. However what she did hear was his lungs, so she thought the other vet probably heard that and thought it was likely that was what the other vet heard and mistook for a heart murmur. He hasn't really had any real issues with it though so far, except for very occasional coughing (single coughs usually.)