How can I keep my cat from passing on intestinal parasites to other pets in the household?

Proper preventative measures. Again, if you introduce a new cat into the house, have that checked and de-wormed properly. But preventative measures are products like Revolution Plus, Revolution, and Advantage Multi for cats. They're flea control, some of them do ticks, they do intestinal worms, they do ear mite—all the things that cats can bring or spread amongst themselves. If you treat them accordingly and keep them on an adequate preventative regularly, you should avoid any problems with that.

Once you suspect that your cat has intestinal parasites, isolate them so that they're not sharing a litter box because cats sharing litter boxes are potentially exposed. And if you have a dog like mine that likes to check out the litter box for some afternoon snacks, then they could be exposed there too. Once we have diagnosed worms and have gotten the deworming in place, you would still want to maintain that separation for at least a few days. And if you have cats that have been sharing a litter box in the household that have been diagnosed with roundworms or hookworms, it's not a bad idea to deworm all the pets in the home to be safe.

By using a regular deworming protocol that your veterinarian recommends, as that will keep them from transmitting it between pets, and we don't want them transmitted to people, so that's the best way to go.

Make sure that you are regularly checking your cat's stool and that you don't see any signs of loose stool or worms, because cats sharing a litter box is a very easy way to get contamination amongst them. Make sure to check that often, and if you believe that they could've been sharing or if you have seen anything unusual, get them dewormed.

The best thing you can do is to clean the litter boxes at least once a day to lessen the fecal exposure of other cats. Another important thing is to have an adequate number of litter box boxes for the number of cats in your house. You have the ideal recommendation. Depending on the household, the ideal number of litter boxes is one litter box per cat plus one. Having plenty of litter box resources will help reduce fecal exposure between the cats. We recommend putting those litter boxes in different places around the house. If your cats are messy with the litter box, get into the habit of wiping their feet every so often. Again, I can't stress the importance of regular parasite prevention for all the cats enough, even if you only have indoor cats.

First, have a fecal sample analyzed at your veterinarian's office to identify if your cat is harboring any intestinal parasites. Intestinal parasites for cats are specific to cats, and dog-specific parasites are specific to dogs. By separating your infected cat from other cats, you can administer medications and dewormers, as well as provide preventatives for your other cats to treat and prevent intestinal parasites in your household.

Keeping the litter box clean is crucial. I recommend cleaning it at least weekly, if not daily.