What is Cat Scratch Fever?

1) Cat Scratch Fever is a premium line of cat and bird related furniture items.

2) Cat Scratch Fever is also the title of a 1977 album by Ted Nugent.

3) Cat scratch fever or Cat-scratch disease is a usually benign infectious disease, usually found in children 1-2 weeks following a cat scratch. First described in 1889 by Henri Parinaud is has been called Parinaud oculoglandular disease. The cat was recognized as the vector of the disease in 1931 by Dr. Robert Debré.

The disease begins with a small pustule at the site of the scratch, and painful swelling of the local lymph nodes follows. There may be fever, malaise and anorexia. The disease usually resolves spontaneously, with or without treatment, in one month.

The causative organism is an organism, called Bartonella henselae. It is a rod-shaped Gram negative organism. Kittens are more likely to carry the bacteria in their blood, and are therefore more likely to transmit the disease than are adult cats.

Most cat-scratch disease begins with a scratch from the claw or tooth of a kitten younger than six months of age. It can also be caught from an adult cat. In California, about 40% of the cats carry Bartonella. The disease seems to rarely occur following a dog scratch or even from porcupine quills or cactus spines. Most cases of cat-scratch disease occur in children between the ages of 2 and 14, and in veterinarians (those most likely to be scratched by a cat). For reasons yet to be determined, most cases occur in the fall or winter months, although areas with extremely cold winters where temperatures drop to below freezing for prolonged periods show the lowest rates of infection.

Sometime between 3 and 30 days following the scratch (usually 7 to 12 days), the infected person breaks out with one or more pimples at the site of the scratch. These last for 1 to 4 weeks, until nearby lymph nodes begin to swell and become tender. Sometimes these will drain pus. Only about a third of those infected will feel sick, with a fever, fatigue, decreased appetite, or headache. This is not a serious disease.

Most of the time, the swollen lymph nodes last from 4 to 6 weeks, and then the person fully recovers. Treatment is usually unnecessary, since people recover well on their own, but several antibiotics have been shown to shorten the course of the illness.

Diagnosis is now made by a blood test.

We also know that if infected kittens are housed with non-infected kittens, the Bartonella is not passed -- unless fleas are present. Fleas pass Bartonella from one cat to another. We don't believe that fleas pass Bartonella to humans, though, since the pimples occur in healing scratches, not in flea bites. (And almost all the people with the disease have been scratched by a cat, while only a few seem to have had flea bites at all).

Surprisingly, though, multiple recent attempts to find traces of the bacteria on the nail clippings of infected kittens have proven completely unsuccessful.