Infectious disease management in animal shelters is critical for both individual cat welfare and population health, requiring active protocols to prevent outbreaks.
Animal shelters present paradoxical welfare challenges: they protect animals from outdoor hazards while exposing them to concentrated infectious disease. A cat that enters a shelter healthy may contract a serious respiratory infection due to housing stress and disease exposure. Effective shelter medicine requires vaccination on intake, population management to avoid overcrowding, and rapid identification and isolation of sick animals. Shelters with robust infectious disease protocols have dramatically lower disease mortality and shorter lengths of stay.