Avian Flu Found in a German Cat

The H5N1 strain of bird flu has been found in a cat in Germany, the first time it has been identified in an animal other than a bird in the middle of Europe, officials said Tuesday.

Health officials urged cat owners to keep their pets indoors after the dead feline was discovered over the weekend on the Baltic Sea island of Ruegen, where most of Germany’s more than 100 infected wild birds have been found.

The cat was believed to have eaten an infected bird, said Thomas Mettenleiter, head of Germany’s Friedrich Loeffler Institute. That is in keeping with a pattern of disease transmission seen in wild cats in Asia.

Mettenleiter insisted, however, that there was no danger to humans because there had been no documented cases of a cat transmitting the virus to people.

However, Maria Cheng of the World Health Organization in Geneva said there was not enough information on how the disease is transmitted to be sure.

“We don’t know if [cats] would play a role in transmitting the disease. We don’t know how much virus the cats would excrete, how much people would need to be exposed to before they would fall ill,” Cheng said.

In addition to larger, wild cats infected in Thailand, three house cats near Bangkok, the Thai capital, were infected with the virus in February 2004. Officials said one of those cats ate a dead chicken on a farm where there was a bird flu outbreak, and the virus apparently spread to the others.

WHO said tests on three civets that died in captivity in June in Vietnam also detected H5N1. The source of that infection was unknown.

Twenty-one people in Turkey tested positive for H5N1 in January and four of them, all children, died.

WHO on Monday raised its tally of human bird flu cases worldwide to 173, including 93 deaths. Almost all human bird flu deaths have been linked to contact with infected birds.