How to Check Your Cat for Anemia & Flea Infestation

Video Transcript

" Hi, this is Dr. Greg McDonald, and we are coming to you from Expert Village.com. We are talking about emergency first aid in your cat. One of the things that we wanted to talk briefly about was flea control in your cat because it may not sound like it is an emergency, but if your cat gets too many fleas, they can actually become anemic. Fleas actually are biting your cat and taking blood out of your cat. This is especially true in young cats when they are very young, and they are not making red cells fast enough. I wanted to let you know some little things you can look for to see if your cat is becoming anemic from a flea infestation. One of the things that we see is gum color. If you cat is starting to become anemic from fleas for any reason, this cat has nice pink gum color because everything is fine with this cat, but what you could see is a very pale or white gum color. That is also very important to check on a lot of other diseases that we talk about. If your cat is in shock, or if your cat is anemic, whether it is due to fleas or some other reason, the gum color would be one of the most common things that you could tell. The gums turn white when their paxel bynum, their red cell count, gets very low and so checking their gum color is very important. Other things that you can see to find out if your cat has fleas is if you pick a leg up like this and look underneath, you can actually see if you got a lot of fleas. This cat does not have any fleas on it, but the other thing that you might be able to see even if you don’t see any fleas, you could see little black specs, and again, if you are dealing with a flea infestation that is making your cat anemic, you are going to see a lot of fleas. If you see a lot of fleas on a young cat that, is an emergency, and you really need to take some action right away. If your cat is actually not anemic yet, you can start using some of the flea products that we talked about in other segments such as Advantage. You can put Advantage on some of the very young cats, and as soon as you stop the fleas from chewing on your cat and sucking the blood, your cat will start making new red cells and be able to fix the problem itself if you catch it early. If the gums are white and your cat is actually lethargic from this problem, you are going to need to see your veterinarian maybe actually to do some blood transfusion in order to save your cat. So flea control is very important, and it becomes an emergency if you had so many fleas it is making your cat anemic."