Diarrhea is the most common sign associated with intestinal disease in the cat. Other signs of intestinal disease include anorexia, weight loss, abdominal discomfort, and vomiting. Common intestinal causes of diarrhea include infectious diseases (Table 1), food allergy/intolerance, inflammatory bowel disease, and lymphoma. It is important to remember that diarrhea can also be a result of non-in...

BACKGROUND There are no rapid tests that can distinguish contagious gastroenteritis, which requires isolation at its onset, from exacerbation of chronic inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) or bowel engagement in the course of systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS). Hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) is an acute phase cytokine that is produced at the site of injury. It has high affinity to sulf...

With the aim of setting up an animal model of Shigella dysenteriae-induced diarrhea, Wistar rats received per os increasing densities of S. dysenteriae type 1 (Sd1). Inoculum of 12 x 10(8) Sd1 provoked dysenteric diarrhea within 24 h. Feces of healthy rats were molded, brown to black and rough. Rats developing diarrhea presented blood at the anal orifice; stools were soft or liquid containing m...

The recent paper by H. E. Muller (3) on the role of the Morganella-Proteus-Providencia group in diarrheal disease raises some important points. Previous reports have speculated on the role of these organisms in gastrointestinal disease (1, 2, 4). To date, no specific mechanism of pathogenicity has been described which links the Proteeae with infectious diarrhea. The prevalence study reported by...

Diarrhea of infant mice, aside from its economic importance to breeding colonies, is the cause of considerable trouble in laboratories using such animals for investigafional purposes. A description of this disease, its epidemiology and pathology have been reported in some detail (1-6), and a few transmission experiments have been conducted by Cheerer and Mueller (1). Although the results of the...

Clostridium difficile is the most important cause of nosocomial infectious diarrhea. The importance of C. difficile-associated diarrhea (CDAD) has been poorly investigated in patients with neutropenia who have hematologic malignancies. A retrospective chart review of all patients treated in the leukemia ward of a university medical center during 1991-2000 determined that 875 courses of myelosup...