Shelter intake & outbreak checklist — feline trichomonosis
Tritrichomonas foetus / blagburni. For the person who has to make placement, staffing and budget decisions. This is not a clinical protocol — drug decisions, doses and monitoring belong to your shelter veterinarian.
1 · On intake — record these, every cat
- Loose, soft or watery stool now, or reported in the last 4 weeks — stool score 1–7, dated
- From a cattery, hoarding seizure, shelter transfer or known-positive household
- Group-housed, or shared a litter tray with a cat later found positive
- Foul smell noted by staff; straining, urgency, mucus or blood
- Name, source, intake date, current tray group — written down, not remembered
Roughly a quarter of positive cats in sanctuary-type populations have completely normal stool. A clean-looking cat is not therefore clear, and stool appearance cannot rule the infection in or out.
2 · Sampling
- PCR for Tritrichomonas on feces is the test. A direct smear (≈14%) cannot exclude it.
- Fecal loop, collected fresh, no litter in the tube. Loop samples were 2.04× more likely PCR-positive than colonic flush in 1,717 cats. Label with sample method and date — the result is uninterpretable later without it.
- If you cannot test everyone: test every cat with diarrhea, test every cat from a known-positive household, and treat the population as potentially positive until you have reason not to. Do not test only the diarrhea cases and conclude the rest are clean.
- Positive PCR + no symptoms still means carrier. Symptom-free cats shed and can infect others; this is the usual route by which a "cleared" household relapses.
3 · Isolation: test status and symptom status are different axes
| Status | Action |
|---|---|
| Positive, symptomatic | Isolate; veterinary treatment decision; separate tray, scooper, gloves; hold through treatment and retest. |
| Positive, asymptomatic | Treat as a carrier. Isolate from negative cats or house only with disclosed positives; do not adopt into a multi-cat home without disclosure. |
| Negative, symptomatic | Still isolate: PCR is ≈94% sensitive, so a single negative does not exclude. Retest or investigate other causes. |
| Untested, exposed | Assume positive for management purposes — separate resources, no shared trays, no mixing with negative cats. |
Where control keeps failing despite good hygiene, treating all in-contact cats regardless of result is a recognized fallback — it trades drug exposure in healthy cats for the carriers a test misses. That trade-off is a veterinary decision, made in writing.
4 · Litter and environment — the cheapest lever you have
There is no cyst stage, and the organism survives only days in moist stool. Remove stool promptly and disinfect second. Scooping four times a day beats deep-cleaning once a week; enough trays that no cat queues at a soiled box beats both. Impermeable surfaces, daily tray changes, separate scoops per group. Routine disinfectants are adequate — this is not a panleukopenia protocol.
5 · The medication is a staff-safety item
- Ronidazole is a suspected human reproductive and carcinogenic hazard — the reason for the food-animal ban. Compounded powder is the highest-exposure form.
- Pregnant, breastfeeding and immunocompromised volunteers must not handle the powder or dose cats.
- Ask the pharmacy for capsules rather than powder where possible. Gloves, a dedicated dosing station, no splitting or crushing in the open, storage away from food and out of reach of children.
- Log every dose given, and by whom — missed doses are a leading cause of apparent treatment failure.
6 · What the adopter is told, in writing, with dates
“Tested for Tritrichomonas by PCR on ____________ using a ____________ sample. Result: ____________. Treated from __________ to __________. Retested on __________: ____________. A negative retest does not by itself establish clearance — relapse has been reported up to 20 weeks after the last dose — so ____________ may still be a carrier. The diarrhea may return, and a multi-cat household carries a risk.”
If clearance was not confirmed, say so. Ambiguity here is what damages trust later, and it is what puts the adopter's other cats at risk.
7 · The budget decision, stated honestly
Budget for a second course in roughly one in four treated cats, and for the holding time: about 14 days of treatment, then a retest, then a clearance window you can afford. Drug availability has been an international supply problem, not a local one. For a rescue with limited funds, litter management plus adoption disclosure prevents more downstream transmission than treating a handful of cats and re-exposing them to an uncleared population. A cat whose diarrhea settled but who was never confirmed clear is a carrier until proven otherwise.
Isolation welfare: treat the isolation space as a space, not a cage — a hiding place, vertical space, food, water and litter kept apart, something to do, and daily human contact that is not only the moment of dosing. Cats deteriorate in bare cages, and it is easy to get wrong on a busy shift.
Sources
- Gookin JL, Hanrahan K, Levy MG. The conundrum of feline trichomonosis. J Feline Med Surg 2017;19:261–274.
- Hedgespeth BA, Stauffer SH, Gookin JL. Fecal sample collection technique and treatment history with T. foetus PCR results in 1,717 cats. J Vet Intern Med 2020;34:734–741.
- Prevalence of enteropathogens in cats with and without diarrhea in four management models for unowned cats in the southeast United States. PMC7110508.
- ABCD. Guideline for trichomonosis. abcdcatsvets.org.
- Tritrichomonas foetus: what shelters need to know. Maddie's Shelter Medicine Program, Cornell University.
- AVMA recalls and safety alerts — ronidazole for veterinary compounding use.
tritrichomonasproject.org/print/shelter-intake