ospam (Yngver) wrote:
wrote:

As stated earlier the urine culture results came back negative.
My vet is assuming that she has a kidney infection but doesn't
know what kind of organism it is (if it's really an infection).

So it may not be easy to say if enrofloxacin or Orbifloxacin
will work better in this case.

Thanks again for the info.

I should add that in my case, my cat was clearly very sick
and it wouldn't have been prudent to waffle about whether to
switch her from Baytril to Orbax when she had not responded
to other antibiotics prior to administering Baytil.

In your case, it's not even clear that your cat has an
infection, correct? The evidence was the blood in the urine
sample, but is there any other sign of infection ? My cat was
running a very high fever.

Here are some references you can look at:
http://www.vetmedcenter.com/professi...688&doctype=ED
http://www.tufts.edu/vet/vet_common/..._march2003.pdf

This second one from Tufts may have the info you are looking
for. It describes studies designed to determine a correlation
between dosage of Baytril and Orbax and retinal degeneration
in cats. While both drugs produced incidences of blindness at
high dosages, the mfr of Orbax determined the drug to be safe
at a dosage of 15 mg/kg per day (although one cat did develop
retinal degeneration on this dosage), while Bayer's toxicity
test of Baytril found no incidence of retinal damage at the
currently recommended max dosage of 5 mg/kg per day.

You may want to show this article to your vet, if you still
want to argue the case with him.

Thanks Yngver. My cat lost some weight a couple of weeks ago
(which I thought was due to all the smoke from the wild fires)
but has gained most of it back.

Right now beside the high red blood cell counts in the urine
she's doing just fine. I don't even have to give her Prednisone
(for the IBD) that often any more.

Another option is to check her urine again in a week or two.
I think there's a good chance it will be normal again.