H5N1 now in cats, pigs feared next

Geneva - The discovery of a bird-flu infection in a cat in Germany underscores what scientists have long known - that the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus can infect a wide range of mammals, said a spokesperson for the World Health Organisation on Tuesday.
"We know that mammals can become infected with H5N1," said Maria Cheng of the WHO.
"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."
While it is the first confirmed case of a mammal being infected with H5N1 in Europe, the virus has proved deadly to tigers and snow leopards in a Thai zoo, where they were fed chicken carcasses, she noted.
Big cats died from H5N1 in Thailand in 2003 and 2004.
"That's been one of the features of H5N1, that it has been able to infect a pretty wide variety of mammals," said Cheng.
She said she knew of no case where an infected mammal had passed the disease on to a human being.
The cat was found dead on the Baltic Sea island of Ruegen, where most of the more than 100 cases of H5N1-infected wild birds in Germany have been found, said Germany's Friedrich Loeffler Institute lab on Tuesday.
It is possible the cat ate a bird, Cheng said. "Cats have often been experimentally infected in Holland."
Scientists are particularly concerned about bird flu infecting pigs, because swine also can become infected with human-flu virus.
The fear is that the two viruses could swap genetic material and create a new one that could set off a human pandemic that could prove more deadly than routine, annual influenza epidemics.
"We're particularly worried about pigs because they can have both human and bird flu at the same time and they can pass it on back to humans in a new form, which is essentially what happened in the last two pandemics (in 1957 and 1968)", said Cheng.