Cats and Owners at Risk for Bird Flu
Austria confirmed that the H5N1 bird flu virus was found three cats at an animal shelter. Officials believe the cats caught the virus from infected birds that the shelter had taken in. This case follows a previous case in Germany where a cat had died from H5N1 in February.
These are the first reports of cats being infected this year, but this has occured before. In 2004, some Asian countries reported domestic and wild cats, as well as dozens of tigers where killed by the bird flu virus. This is a real potential problem.
What is the significance of this? This is huge!
Your beloved pets are more likely to become infected with the bird flu than you are. It's easy for us to avoid contact with sick and dead birds, but our pets cannot make this judgement. A sick bird is just easy prey on a playful afternoon hunt.
If you are one of the animal lovers who own both cats and birds, your cat could potentially pass the avian flu virus to your birds. This would cause a lot of heartache in our family.
By passing to the feline population, the bird flu virus has an even greater chance for mutation into a human-passable form! The more organisms that can host the virus, the more mutations will occur. In the US alone, just counting cats 'owned' by households, there are 70 million new hosts for the virus to grow and potentially mutate. This only includes claimed household pets. These figures do not include strays or wild cats. If you figure in the population of all cats around the world, we start to get into billions of new potential hosts (victims).
Even without mutation into a human passable form, there is an urgent threat. The current H5N1 strain could start claiming a significantly increasing amount of human victims. The virus is found in fecal matter of sick birds. Contact with this matter when handling the birds is one way people currently catch the virus. Most people do not handle birds enough to be at risk. But cats, now that is a different story.
Once the virus becomes prevalent in cats, every cat owner will be at risk. Changing the cat litter boxes could become a very dangerous activity, especially if your cats are allowed outdoors or come into contact with outdoor cats. Dirty cat paws could even contaminate other surfaces in your home.
What Can We Do?
Keep your indoor cats inside and don't let outdoor cats outside. Also wash your hands after handling outdoor cats. This will go a long way toward preventing your pets from infection once the bird flu comes to the animal population in your area. If we do this now, America will not be like Europe where thousands of cats are tragically being abandoned or put down in the panic over this new threat.
Read More:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4780066.stm
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/health/03cats.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/01/health/main1361007.shtml
Sincerely,
Clint Fountain
Fluplan.com