Ocorrência da infecção pelo Vírus da Leucemia Felina (FeLV) em gatos domésticos do município do Rio de Janeiro e Baixada Fluminense e análise dos fatores de risco para a infecção

Abstract

The present study had the aim to make a survey of the Feline Leukemia Virus infection in domestic cats of Rio de Janeiro city and Baixada Fluminense region and to analyze risk factors involved in this infection. For this purpose, peripheral blood smears of 1094 cats had been submitted to indirect immunofluorescence for viral antigen detection and data relative to the animals surveyed, such as sex, age, race, access to the street, sexual life, housing, number of contactants and symptoms and/or clinical signals had been registered in individual files. Among the analyzed samples, 11,52% were positive for the test, corresponding to 11,49% of the animals collected at the Rio de Janeiro city and 11,62% of the collected samples at Baixada Fluminense region. The qui-square test was used for the descriptive analysis of all the selected variables, where only the significant variable had been included in multivariate analysis, by logistic regression. In accordance to these analysis, the access to the street, the age range between 1 and 5 years old and the cohabitation with too much cats in groups among 6 to15 cats and above of 15 cats had been considered risk factors for FeLV infection.