Cat Bites More Serious Than You Think, 33 Percent of Victims Hospitalized

While some dog breeds have a bad reputation as biters, man's other best friend, cats, have a less-well-publicized biting habit with a dangerous record, with one-third of cat bites to the hand requiring the victim to be hospitalized, according to new research.

Writing in the Journal of Hand Surgery, a team of Mayo Clinic doctors report cats' sharp fangs make their bites more dangerous than dog bites.

"The dogs' teeth are blunter, so they don't tend to penetrate as deeply and they tend to leave a larger wound after they bite. The cats' teeth are sharp and they can penetrate very deeply, they can seed bacteria in the joint and tendon sheaths," said senior author Dr. Brian Carlsen, a Mayo Clinic plastic surgeon and orthopedic hand surgeon.

"It can be just a pinpoint bite mark that can cause a real problem, because the bacteria get into the tendon sheath or into the joint where they can grow with relative protection from the blood and immune system," Carlsen added, noting that the bacteria injected into the body by cat bites is notably hard to fight with antibiotics.

Carlsen and his colleagues found that two-thirds of people admitted to the hospital for a cat bite between 2009 and 2011 needed surgery and that middle-aged women were the most common cat bite victims. The researchers identified 193 patients with cat bites to the hand, with 57 of the patients requiring hospitalization for their wounds. Of those 57 patients, 38 needed their wounds surgically irrigated and debrided. Eight patients needed more than one operation and one needed reconstructive surgery, the doctors report.

Additional data obtained by the researchers revealed that the mean time between being bitten by a cat and seeking medical treatment was 27 hours.

"Thirty-six of the 193 patients were hospitalized immediately when they sought medical care, while 154 were treated with oral antibiotics as outpatients and three weren't treated," the researchers said in a statement. "The outpatient antibiotic treatment failed in 21 patients, a 14 percent failure rate, and those patients needed to be hospitalized."

Carlsen said that because cat bites often look innocuous, people tend to be more dismissive of them than they would be for a dog bite, a habit he says is a mistake.

 "Cat bites look very benign, but as we know and as the study shows, they are not," Carlsen said. "They can be very serious."