Cat Fever

Only recently have doctors recognized cat-scratch disease to account for the previously unexplained aches and fevers that occasionally afflict cat fanciers. And there is still plenty for doctors to learn about the oddly varied and sometimes serious forms that the disease can take, says the A.M.A. Journal. Latest information: it can be caught by a person who may not even have been scratched.

The new evidence was supplied by Dr. John N. Snyder of Catonsville, Md., who treated five cases in a single family. First victim was a thoroughly scratched ten-year-old boy, who went to the doctor's office with a sore throat, swelling on one side of his face and neck, and enlarged lymph glands. The boy recovered in a couple of days without treatment. Next came his three-month-old baby brother, also suffering from a swollen neck, fever, and a lump bigger than a golf ball at the base of his neck. The baby had apparently never been scratched by the family kitten, but Dr. Snyder concluded that the lump in his neck was his thymus gland, swollen by a cat-scratch infection that had probably penetrated the skin through a rash. The baby got better after penicillin treatment.

The third victim was an eleven-year-old girl. She had many of the same symptoms, plus conjunctivitis and a sore around her nose. These cleared up after tetracycline treatment. Then the family's six-and seven-year-old boys came to the doctor. They had severely abscessed glands, one in the armpit and the other behind the ear, which had to be punctured and drained.

Neither Dr. Snyder nor anyone else has yet identified the actual cause of cat-scratch fever, but it is believed to be an unusually large virus--the only kind that can be effectively treated with antibiotics.

Why the sixth child in the Catonsville family did not get sick, though he was often scratched, the doctor has no idea.

And, he notes, the kitten that set off the two-month family epidemic showed no sign of illness.

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