Cat Chat Feline Forum

When I adopted my 5 month old kitty, my fiancé and I found out shortly afterward he has stomatitis. The vet was extremely shocked because they said they normally see this with older cats (not kittens). Long story short, my fiancé and I got surgery to remove all his teeth (vet recommended it) and he is happier and healthier than ever! All that inflammation is gone!

The thing is, our cat gets lonely while we work Mon-Fri 9-5 jobs. Every time we come home he meows for us (even though he has food in his bowl) and he's very affectionate. We've been wanting another cat... But we don't want our cat to infect the other cat if it's healthy ):

Does anybody else have a cat with stomatitis and another cat with no stomatitis?

I don't know whether it is similar or not, but one of our cats has, what the vet has referred to as, viral gingivitis. This is an inflamation of the gums around the teeth, normally associated with scale an d the need for a dental. Saturn is just under 2 years old and his teeth are fine, its just the gums. He can eat fine, but he does suffer from bad breath. The vet did warn us that there might be problems later on and he might need his teeth out, this can sometimes help but not always, hence why it wasn't done straight away. I had the feeling that while the vet recognised it, they don't really know what causes it, so viral is as good a guess as any.

We have 2 other cats, one a similar age adopted at the same time from the same rescue, and a 13 year old that was already in residence. Neither have developed the condition.

I do wonder if some conditions are still poorly understood and a name is given to the symptoms even though the full details for the cause etc aren't really known.

This may not be a lot of help, and the best thing I can suggest is to talk to your vet and possibly the local rescue centres. A lot of cats that end up in rescues aren't in the best condition and therefore suseptable to anything going, so the people who run them seem to have a lot of experience in conditions that can be passed around.