Cats have been a popular species of animals as companion animals and their health awareness has become an important issue among both veterinarians and owners. Septicaemia is one of the most important disease in both human and veterinary medicine. This article describes a retrospective study involving septicaemia cases among cats between 2006 and 2016 presented to the Post-mortem Laboratory, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Universiti Putra Malaysia. Some of the common microorganisms causing septicaemia in these cats include Escherichia coli (41%), Klebsiella pneumoniae (14%), Rhodococcus equi (13%) Streptococcus sp. (11%), Staphylococcus sp. (9%), Pasteurella sp. (8%), Salmonella sp. (2.4%) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (1.6%). Respiratory tract was observed as the most common point of entry of microorganisms leading to septicaemia in cats albeit statistically insignificant (34.7%, P>0.05). These septicaemic cases were highly associated with risk factors such as underlying infection (55.6%), stress (18.5%), malnutrition (18.5%), tumour (5.6%) and traumatic injury (16.9%). Further analysis revealed that underlying viral infection predominates compared to bacterial and parasitic infections. Septicaemia is an important health problem among cats and different agents are associated with different point of entries. The association and the relationship between the aetiological agents, points of entry, and risk factors were further discussed.

To Cite This Article: Rathiymaler M, Annas S, Zamri-Saad M, Jesse FFA and Zakaria Z, 2019. A study of aetiology and risk factors of bacterial septicaemia of cats. Pak Vet J, 39(2): 236-240. http://dx.doi.org/10.29261/pakvetj/2019.027