"Cat lovers can be tranquil," Italy's health minister, Francesco Storace, said in a statement reported via Italy On Line, a news service of the Italian prime minister's office.
"There are no worries for the cat, because it usually does not eat infected animals."
Nor, Storace added, is there a risk to humans. Even in Asia, where bird flu is epidemic, nobody has ever been infected by eating an infected bird, he said.
In a lengthy report the French Web site Actualités News Environnement (ANE) agreed that there is little risk to pets or people.
"It isn't easy for a cat to become infected," Michael Schmidt, a virologist at Berlin's Free University, told the English-language edition of ANE. "Probably the cat ate a highly infectious animal."
As a precautionary measure, Schmidt advised cat owners in affected regions to avoid sleeping with their pets.
King, of Michigan State, agreed that there's no reason to panic.
"We don't know the circumstances of this animal," he said, noting that the animal might have been exposed to a very high dose of the virus, or suffering from some other disease that weakened the cat's immune system.
"What makes this [announcement] special is that it's not wild swans or migrating waterfowl," he said. "People are more connected to their companion animals. … It's melodramatic."
From a medical point of view, King added, the big concern is that, the longer the H5N1 strain continues to infect birds, the more chance there is for it to change into something more capable of direct transmission from mammal to mammal, which would greatly increase the odds of a human bird flu pandemic.
Still, King said, "I don't think I would change any behavior with my pets right now." After all, "this is one case, from how many millions of cats in Europe?"
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