German cat tests positive for deadly bird flu strain

Feline likely infected after eating sick bird

? The deadly strain of bird flu has been found in a cat in Germany, officials said Tuesday, the first time the virus has been identified in an animal other than a bird in central Europe.

Health officials urged cat owners to keep pets indoors after the dead cat was discovered over the weekend on the Baltic Sea island of Ruegen, where most of the more than 100 wild birds infected by the H5N1 strain have been found.

The cat is 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, there was no danger to humans as there have 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. She noted that tigers and snow leopards in a zoo in Thailand became infected after being fed chicken carcasses, dying from H5N1 in 2003 and 2004.

“But we don’t know what this means for humans. We don’t know if they 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.

Veterinarian Xavier Banse, rear, his head hidden by a television camera, shows reporters a bottle of influenza vaccine before injecting it into a poultry farm duckling as poultry farmer Serge Junca, right, holds the animal Monday in Classun, southwestern France. Central Europe saw its first case of bird flu in an animal other than a bird Tuesday as a German cat tested positive for the virus.

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

Cheng said the discovery of bird flu in a cat in Germany underscores that the deadly H5N1 strain can infect a wide range of mammals.

Scientists are particularly concerned about bird flu infecting pigs, because swine also can become infected with the human flu virus. The fear is the two viruses could swap genetic material and create a new virus that could set off a human flu pandemic.