Feline Leukemia Virus (FeLV)

Last year, we lost a couple of cats we adopted that we knew had feline leukemia virus. I found that most vets who were doing triage were not very well informed about the virus. Most of them recommended euthanasia when our first cat Twig ended up with pretty severe anemia, without any explainations of alternate treatments.

Here’s a dump of the papers I went through to try to understand what the current literature says about the virus:

This paper was particularly helpful, since it contained a pretty comprehensive overview of what the existing literature actually says:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1098612X15610676

Particularly, this section:

It took us maybe 3-4 vets before we could talk to an internal medicine vet who validated that the approach stated above was valid and we she had some successes with a couple of her patients. Even though we ended up losing our cat in the end anyways, I wish it didn’t take us so long to get to that point However, I’m glad we did do some digging anyways and finally ended up talking to someone with answers.

This reminds me a lot of the experience I had with (human) doctors growing up. My brother had some pretty severe auto-immune issues growing up, and we often had varying levels of support from the doctors that we went to.

Other notes

Zidovudine, or AZT shows up as one of the drugs researchers have tried. This was one of the first drugs used to treat HIV.
FeLV generally doesn’t seem to be that well known, and so it seems like there’s not a lot of funding that goes towards it
Austin Pets Alive (APA) is one of the few shelters that doesn’t euthanize FELV positive on arrival/positive test result