Please help! Abandoned kitten with coccidia!

Hi, I am helping out a Cat Resuce place. We have a little kittne who was found abandoned on the road infested with maggots. While the maggots were all removed and he seed to be doing fine, he got coccidia. His fecal turned out negative to coccidia in the bgining, but yet he was given albon as a preventative measure. a week later he had runny stools. He was put on albon again and given marquis paste. He then seemed to be doing better. But a week later, once again runny stools. He is about 3 months old now. We will be giving him antibiotics - primor sulfadiazine. Has anyone experienced something like this ? where niether albon nor marquis paste is killing the coccidia ? He tested negative for giardia yesterday. Thanks for your help.

mugdha said:

Hi, I am helping out a Cat Resuce place. We have a little kittne who was found abandoned on the road infested with maggots. While the maggots were all removed and he seed to be doing fine, he got coccidia. His fecal turned out negative to coccidia in the bgining, but yet he was given albon as a preventative measure. a week later he had runny stools. He was put on albon again and given marquis paste. He then seemed to be doing better. But a week later, once again runny stools. He is about 3 months old now. We will be giving him antibiotics - primor sulfadiazine. Has anyone experienced something like this ? where niether albon nor marquis paste is killing the coccidia ? He tested negative for giardia yesterday. Thanks for your help.

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Coccidia can be very difficult to manage. :nod: There is a very specific probiotic you can administer along WITH the antibiotic as an adjunct therapy. You can ask the vet if you have any questions, but they'll easily find the information on it. It is called Saccharomyces Boulardii, or S. Boulardii, and it is not a traditional type of probiotic, in that it is yeast-based, and does not "repopulate" the gut the way an acidophilus or bifidobacterium does. So it needs to be administered 2x a day, but unlike other probiotics, the timing in relation to the antibiotic doesn't matter.

If you live in the US, I recommend the Jarrow S. Boulardii + MOS (a substrate that helps the probiotic adhere to the intestinal lining). We rescued two kittens in June that had coccidia. We asked the vet to treat them with ONLY the probiotic, not the antibiotic, and it worked. But it has to be given 2x a day for at least a month.

It also works for strains of Clostridium (C. Perfringrens and C. Difficile). A TCS member reported about it's efficacy here: http://www.thecatsite.com/t/259985/trouble-in-raw-paradise-clostridium-perfringens-and-my-cats

And a general discussion of probiotics (which are a good idea after all those antibiotics) here, where I mention the kittens with coccidia: http://www.thecatsite.com/t/262587/probiotics-search-human-grade-and-cfus

This is the Jarrow S. Boulardii we used for the kittens:
The ADULT cat dose is 250mg 2x a day. The KITTEN dose is 125mg 2x a day. The problem? THIS STUFF IS BITTER. Very bitter.

I currently give my cats this probiotic, that has 5 billion CFU of S. boulardii IN it:
...but I did not use the Nexabiotic probiotic to treat the kittens, and it doesn't have the MOS that the Jarrow does, so I do not know from experience if it will work as well for coccidia. This one is NOT bitter because of the other ingredients masking the S. boulardii, and the cats eat it just sprinkled on their food. Theoretically, it should help. If you decide to try this one, the dose for kittens would be 1/4 capsule 2x a day.

FYI, the only option I found with the Jarrow S. boulardii + MOS was buying size 3 empty gel caps, a manual filler, mixing it 50/50 with another probiotic to bump the amount of powder so that I wound up with 125mg in each gel cap, and just pilling the kittens.

If you use the Nexabiotic 20 strain for the S. Boulardii content and palatability, if you want the benefit of the other probiotic strains in it, it would have to be administered 2 hours before or after the antibiotics. :nod:

It is surely safe to use, but if you have doubts, ask your vet to look into it. There is a LOT of research on S. boulardii. And in the link to the discussion of it's use for clostridium, above, the person that started the thread posted a link to the one study she found where it was used in a cat - that's how the dose and length of time for use in cats was determined.

Good luck.

Thanks for the information. I will check with the vet about the S Boulardi probiotic to supplement with he antibiotic.  Seems he may also have some underlying immunity issues . Hope the little fella makes it. He's been thru such a lot already.