Cats, bird flu and disasters from WiredNews

When Fluffy Catches the Bird Flu

As medical research links house pets to SARS and bird flu, public health officials have something new to worry about: the risk that poodles and parakeets will need to be quarantined during an outbreak. The worst-case scenario? A runaway epidemic that can only be stopped by dispatching pets to that big animal shelter in the sky.

During Toronto's SARS outbreak in 2003, cats were ignored because health officials "had bigger things on their minds," said Dr. Scott Weese, a veterinarian and associate professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario. "But we need to think about it. What if someone had SARS in their household and infected their cat, and their cat went outside and infected feral cats? SARS would still be in Toronto, or there would be no cats in Toronto."

Weese and a colleague argue in the June issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases that health officials and veterinarians need to develop quarantine protocols for house pets in case of an epidemic.

Among household pets, cats and birds seem to pose the most danger as potential transmitters of epidemic disease. In Germany, a cat's death from avian flu earlier this year sparked the government to warn people to keep their cats inside and not to sleep with them.

Research does suggest that cats get avian flu from eating infected birds and can spread it to each other, said Dr. Michael Greger, who oversees public health for The Humane Society of the United States.

This is surprising because until now, "no flu virus in recorded history (has) been able to make cats sick," he said. Still, no cat-to-human cases have been reported. Cats and ferrets can also become infected with SARS and spread it to each other.

Dogs seem to be in the clear, at least so far. While they share a wide variety of diseases with humans and can spread some to people, there haven't been any reports of dogs coming down with avian flu, Greger said. Even so, dogs have shown signs of avian flu antibodies, suggesting they were exposed but didn't get visibly sick.

If a pet species was connected to avian flu, "the knee-jerk reaction with this virus is mass culling within (the habitat) of a susceptible species," Greger said. "That's what they do with birds."

But in Thailand, the mandatory killing of valuable fighting cocks led people to flee with their birds and spread the disease, he said. In the United States, if authorities even thought about killing cats, "people would run and stay with their cat at their aunt's house five states away."

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, public health officials have been paying more attention to pets and people's reluctance to abandon them in times of crisis, said Dr. Clete DiGiovanni, a public health adviser with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

"When push comes to shove, a lot of people are not going to abandon their pets and may put their own lives at risk because of that," DiGiovanni said.

Indeed, a Zogby International poll released last October found that 61 percent of pet owners surveyed would refuse to evacuate before a disaster if they couldn't take their animals.

However, DiGiovanni added that he's attended meetings where public health officials have argued that it's "ludicrous" to worry about pets when human lives are at stake. According to him, the officials say something along the lines of, "We'll have a difficult enough time managing people; let's not worry about pets."

There are signs that the North American authorities aren't ready to handle simple human quarantines, let alone those complicated by potentially infectious pets.

During the 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto, officials had trouble getting food to people who quarantined themselves at home at the request of the government, DiGiovanni said. And some of those who were self-quarantined left their homes to walk their dogs.

"We don't really have well-established quarantine protocols in place," said Dr. David Katz, director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center at Yale University. "It's a system we've neglected, and you can't fix that in a sprint. We need to be running a marathon."