Am I dealing with distemper?... Advice desperately needed.

Hi everybody!

I am the lucky foster for 10 kittens that came from the county shelter and one was put down last Thursday based on positive test for distemper.
The rest of the kittens looked fine and the gave them back to me.

Previously to that all the kittens had URI which I successfully treated but just that one kitten failed to get better. A private vet diagnosed him with pneumonia but after administering Baytril for 4 days there was no improvement and he started vomiting...

Well.. It is of course an obvious nightmare for anybody.

My question is: was it truly distemper?..
Why out of both litters (came together with two moms from the same household, so no cross-contamination) only one kitten got sick and the rest are fine?..

I have them for over a MONTH!... They were all weakened by URI, so how could they have been harboring panleuk for that long?...

Today I noticed one kitten was not eating and was slightly fatigued and had heavy eyes like he was so tired. Slight dehydration.


They ate about 6 weeks + and had their first FVRCP last Thursday...

The sick kitten was sick for quite a while and the only place we took him to was a very clean vet's office. Prior to that he was at the shelter clinic June 10th. And put down June 26... He was very weak and it appeared that he had uri complications like pneumonia and eye infection.
Why would it take SO LONG?...

They were all together and why the others seemed fine all this time?..

Now they have the following symptoms affecting nearly all of them that started after we came back from the shelter on the 26th

1. Feline acne - really rapidly progressing on all kittens but particularly on two of them.

2. Some have watery eyes with pink inflamed eyelids and some dark brown collections of something that looks like dirt all around the inner eyelid.

3. Discharge from the nose as in URI and mild sneezing here and there.

They are all gaining weight. They eat. They play and run around.

Only one kitten is not eating today and strangely enough that kitten was one of the strongest and didn't have much of the respiratory problems before.

My suspicion:

Ear mites

Flea allergy

Recurrent uri

Allergic reaction to bubble gum pink amoxicillin they gave me at the shelter which is totally useless but has this nasty pink dye in it...
Before I had them on Clavamox for almost a month. Going back to it.

And the worst of all is of course distemper... I hope the shelter lied to me because they just didnt want to treat he sick kitten but what if not?...

Please any advice?..

Sorry nobody has answered before this and hopefully more will be along shortly.  Most of us who do rescue are up to our eyeballs in kittens and problems at this time of year and don't spend as much time on TCS as we do during the rest of the year.  I'm really sorry for your loss of one kitten, but compared to some of the losses recently, that leaves you with a 90% success rate so far.  Many of my friends have been lucky to get 50% lately as the "second wave" of the URI tends to take away even kittens they have pulled through for the previous month.  I think your kittens are just getting that same nasty combo that seems to be going around most of the shelters, possibly a combination of calici virus and herpes virus, and what you call feline acne may be herpes lesions, OR unfortunately could be a fungus or even mites (we've had all of those at the humane society shelter).  

I don't understand the "positive test of distemper" in one kitten out of a bunch this size -- maybe they just wanted to tell you something you might believe, and the kitten was not thriving anyhow.  Were the kittens vaccinated against panleuk right away?  Because once vaccinated,the presence of FPLV antibodies means nothing, so if they DID do a test and got a positive, that would only be diagnostic in an UNvaccinated kitten.  Also, that disease is so fast and deadly that the others would surely have had it, and the symptoms are intestinal, not upper respiratory symptoms.

What we use is Clavamox to prevent secondary bacterial infections (we crush the white pills and dissolve them in water and formula rather than use the vet liquid, which tastes awful and also only keeps about 10 days after mixing) , and we add L-lysine to their formula or food (250 mg. per day total) which will stop the herpes virus from growing any more, and if they have scabies mites, we dab the lesions with ivermectin liquid on a Q-tip which kills them.

If your kittens are 8 weeks old, you could use Advantage Multi on them which would kill ear mites and scabies mites as well as roundworms and whipworms and hookworms, and even heartworm in addition to eliminating the fleas.  We always start our rescue kittens out with this. 

Treating the URI, we also add lactoferrin, which is an immune system booster made from bovine colostrum.  You can order it on Amazon, and it does seem to help them knock out all the leftover sniffles and sneezes and perhaps avoid another relapse.  I use the Jarrow brand which is $18 a bottle of 100 capsules, and again we mix it in their food or formula.  You can do a search on this site for lactoferrin and l-lysine and URI and any other word to find other threads where people have been using these to help the cats pull through.  Just scroll to the top of the page, and right under the brown title bar is a search box.  Type the word in there and click SEARCH (grey buttom on right of the search box field).  Good luck with your babies and let us know how it's going.

Omg Thank you so much for your reply!

You actually confirmed my suspicion from the very beginning that the shelter lied to me about distemper because it doesn't make any sense that only one was affected and the rest are fine when they were so close together. They just told me what was convenient and this is not the first time they lied to me, so I prayed and hoped that they lied and I'm pretty sure at this point they did. They just scared the living crap out of me and caused me such a heartache that I aged 5 years from stress thinking all my kittens are going to die...

I suspected the herpes and calici combo from the beginning and have had them on Clavamox for a month with 250 mg Lysine still continuing every day.

Last time they gave me nasty bubble gum pink Amoxi that obviously didn't do anything but this skin reaction I am observing right now got so much worse after that that I suspect it could be causing contact dermatitis in kittens.

Why would herpes lesions appear now when URI cleared up almost completely?...

And what kind of fungus could cause this?... Do you have the name for it?... Please I suspect it is what you said and they do have ear mites.

The kittens are only 6 weeks old, so I deflea them manually and it is therefore ineffective.

I NEVER dealt with ear mites or scabies mites in my life - just ringworm. I am new to rescue especially in Florida (before I did rescue in Russia that doesn't have shelters, so entirely different set of problems and different climate)

Local rescuers reported me to animal control after I asked for help on FB, so I am alone with this new problem. I am NOT a hoarder or a bad rescuer and animal control actually loved my foster space and how clean I keep everything. It's just rescuers in SoFla are more drama-oriented than actually doing rescue... Well... That's why I am here on TCS

I have an Instagram page called : @broward_cat_rescue but I am not 501 yet and have no funds. I foster these kittens for the county shelter and if I bring another sick kitten in they will just put him/her to sleep that's all. And they told me not to fundraise too...

Please call me: 917-579-6419 whenever you can I just need to ask a couple of questions from an experienced rescuer.
Two questions actually: what kind of fungus you were talking about and herpes lesions treatment and progression.

Thank you again!

And good luck!

It is bad enough having to deal with the kittens you are looking after without being called to account by people who should know better! I feel for you. For info, I have had a kitten dumped on me with similar symptoms and it has taken 6 months of different antibiotics to find the cause and treat it. Eventually we did a biopsy of her eye tissue and she had a fungus infection caused by Mycoplasma. She was given aureomycin topical gel for a month and the eye is clear. You are doing a great job, good luck.

Thank you for your reply

I will look up Mycoplasma...

Omg so many diseases... Jeez...