Ringworm Help

[Totemo_kawaii]

On August 20th, I adopted a little kitten through a rescue( she’s adorable!) I was so excited. I brought her home & kept her in my bedroom. ( I have another adult cat & heard it was best to keep them separated) the first night home, something seemed off. She had little bald patches on her head & wart-like bumps on her paws. I took her to my vet August 22nd & that’s when we found out she has ringworm ever since, I have her quarantined in the bathroom to help prevent it spreading to my other cat. I clean our bedroom & bathroom every single night, I use rescue spray & wipes since it’s safer than bleach , but kills ringworm & does no harm to the kitty. The vet put her on Itrafungol (1 week on, one week off, etc.) she’s on the second week on & im already seeing improvements. I also started this spray I rub on her through a cloth that’s supposed to help. I use it on my other cat as a preventative. Does anyone else have experience with ringworm & is or was on same treatment? When should I expect her to be over this?
Like I said before, I clean every night. Including vacuuming in living room as well( we have carpet) so far, I haven’t gotten any lesions, nor has my other adult cat. Should we be in the clear? If you have ANY tips for me, please let me know! It’s been super super stressful & overwhelming, so any advice or ease would help me. Thank you for reading!

 

[mrsgreenjeens]

Thankfully, I also have never had to deal with ringworm, but we DO have some excellent articles on it:

Ringworm Infestation In Cats: The Housecleaning Regime

Ringworm In Cats: How To Win The Fight

 

[Totemo_kawaii]

Thank you for your kind words & advice!! I’m hanging in there no signs of ringworm in myself, or my other kitty, so this is fantastic!(hopefully I didn’t just jinx it)

 

[Totemo_kawaii]

Thank you for the articles! I read over them & they provided a ton of useful information! I appreciate it!

 

[bigbacon]

we are going through this as well. What I say is don't read into the doom and gloom stuff you see every where. My vet and various other reads, like here, make it not so bad (even though it can be)

Don't sit there and read everything on the internet about it or you'll worry about everything.

The only way to truely get rid of it is to burn the house down and all your stuff and start over according to many places.

Hopefully you don't have a huge house to clean

 

[intertwangled]

We're going through ringworm now. Since we haven't had a lot of luck with cultures (we started out with false negatives so we can't rely on them for clearance) we're going on vet guidance (based on visual inspection) and treatment timelines to determine when it's ok to bring our affected pet (in our case, a dog) back in to the main part of our home from quarantine (which is the back porch by day; the spare bedroom by night). By this Friday (our anticipated end-quarantine date) our dog will have had two maleseb baths (we didn't have the dip at first), two lime sulfur dips (which we stopped because our dog was losing a lot of hair and her skin was drying), 3 Ciderm (chlorine dioxide) shampoo baths, daily lime sulfur topical application to lesion sites, one week itrafungol, one week ketoconazole (vet was out of itrafungol), and 4 weeks of meticulous cleaning and laundry. Our other, asymptomatic dog has been on the same bathing schedule (as a preventative), but no oral medication. Our asymptomatic cat has had one Ciderm shampoo (from J-kat, as other users on this site have recommended to me), and one Dioxi-guard "light shampoo" spray-over. I will probably bathe the kitty in Ciderm at least once again for good measure. I'm treating them both because they've been in contact with my dog, and myself (I'm treating my own lesions). Our vet will keep with the low-dose ketoconazole for our affected dog (which is not recommended for cats,) for another additional week even after she is inside, and I'll likely keep the twice weekly Ciderm baths for another week, and then reduce to once a week for a month after that (for both dogs, and maybe the cat every other week). The kitten that started this mess is (fortunately) currently with another foster home that has a nicer bathroom to keep her in while we take care of our fur-family. Her new foster says she is recovering well.

I've posted this as a reply in another thread as well, but the University of Wisconsin has a great multi-page resource guide about ringworm:

Ringworm - University of Wisconsin Madison Shelter Medicine Program

You could see the other "chapters" on the links on the right side of the page.