The Nevada Humane Society Reno animal shelter recently experienced a panleukopenia outbreak, prompting our organization to implement immediate increased safety protocols and ask for the community’s support. This situation did not affect our animal shelter in Carson City, Nevada.
Panleukopenia (Panleuk) is a virus that affects felines, is highly-contagious and can be deadly. We experienced a heavy Panleuk season throughout 2022 and started seeing a pronounced increase in positive cases of the virus in the cats and kittens housed at our Reno Shelter on Friday, October 7, 2022. Felines that have been vaccinated against the virus have a very low chance of contracting it. The virus does not affect humans.
In response to this outbreak, we increased safety protocols to help keep felines being cared for at our Reno Shelter healthy including and asked our community to help by adopting the healthy, unaffected pets at our shelters. This support allowed us to provide all of our love and care to the sick and exposed cats and kittens in our care who needed us the most.
During the crisis we:
- Implemented strict quarantine protocols to ensure the disease did not spread to uninfected felines. All felines potentially infected with the virus were housed in quarantine areas where they received life-saving treatment.
- Temporarily suspended the intake of all animals from October 12 – 16, 2022 to ensure the health and safety of the unaffected felines in our shelter during that time, and to allow our team to focus all their efforts on caring for the sick cats and kittens.
- We have since resumed intaking animals from our partners at Washoe County Regional Animal Services. We have also resumed accepting animal surrenders from the public as well, prioritizing the homeless pets in the greatest need of assistance. Our goal is always to help keep pets and people together. We do this by providing pet owners with resources to keep their pets with them, or resources to rehome their pets on their own. Our Animal Help Desk will work with all community members requesting pet rehoming services to provide them with support, help point them to resources, and if needed to make them an appointment to surrender their pet.
- We are happy to provide any community members caring for stray cats or kittens to help keep them out of the shelter with pet food during this time. More information is available on our Pet Food Assistance webpage.
- We have since resumed intaking animals from our partners at Washoe County Regional Animal Services. We have also resumed accepting animal surrenders from the public as well, prioritizing the homeless pets in the greatest need of assistance. Our goal is always to help keep pets and people together. We do this by providing pet owners with resources to keep their pets with them, or resources to rehome their pets on their own. Our Animal Help Desk will work with all community members requesting pet rehoming services to provide them with support, help point them to resources, and if needed to make them an appointment to surrender their pet.
- Consulted with the University of Wisconsin Shelter Medicine team, American Pets Alive and Maddie’s Fund for expert advice and to complete blood testing on all of our shelter cats and kittens prior to medically clearing them.
- Closed our Reno Shelter on Wednesday, October 12 2022 so our team could spend the day deep cleaning to prevent any further spread of the virus.
- We did absolutely everything we could to help the unaffected, healthy pets in our shelters get adopted and fostered -including waiving adoption fees. The more pets we were able to get out of our shelters and into happy homes, the more time and attention our team was able to devote to caring for the cats and kittens that needed us during this crisis. It literally helped us save their lives.
“We are excited to share that thanks to the hard work of our staff, our shelter medicine partners and the community members who helped us manage this crisis by donating, adopting, fostering and volunteering their time to help, the sick and exposed cats and kittens at our Reno Shelter are getting well and finding happy homes! We are still working hard to save the life of every feline affected by this outbreak, and we still need the help of our supporters to get there, but we are making a great deal of progress and are so grateful for all the help we have received.” –Greg Hall, CEO, NHS.
What can you do to help?
- Adopt or Foster: When you adopt or foster a shelter pet in need you are saving a life. Right now the shelter pets in the greatest need of help getting out of the shelter are barn cats and kittens recovering from ringworm.
- Volunteer: We need help getting animals out of our Reno Shelter and caring for them while they wait to be adopted or fostered.
- Donate: Monetary donations and items from our Cat & Kitten Wish List and our Chewy Wish List are much needed to help save the lives of the infected cats and kittens.
- Vaccinate: The best defense we have against this virus is to vaccinate cats and kittens to help save their lives.
“For many cats and kittens in animal shelters throughout the country an outbreak like this would be a death sentence, we’re very lucky at NHS as a no-kill shelter that our life-saving mission and the support we receive from our community allows us to save these lives. I am honored to be working alongside this amazing team.” –Rory Adams, COO, NHS.
Anyone with questions about the virus or what we are doing to protect and care for our shelter pets can contact our Animal Help Desk by phone at: 775-856-2000, ext. 200, or by email at animalhelp@nevadahumanesociety.org.