Bird Flu Kills Domestic Cat in Germany

Richard A. Lovett
for National Geographic News

March 1, 2006

A German cat apparently ate the wrong canary.

Or, more likely, it nibbled at the carcass of one of the hundreds of dead birds that have been found in recent weeks on the island of Rügen.

Whatever it ate, the dead cat tested positive for the deadly H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus, German authorities announced yesterday. The domestic animal is the first mammal known to die of the disease in Europe.

Cats, including tigers and panthers, have died of bird flu in Thailand.

"It has long been known from Asia that cats can be infected if they eat infected birds," Thomas Mettenleiter, lab director at Germany's Friedrich Loeffler Institute, told the Sydney, Australia, newspaper the Daily Telegraph.

(Read "Cats Can Catch and Spread Bird Flu, Study Says".)

"The very nature of cats is that they are hunters," Lonnie King, dean of Michigan State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, told National Geographic News.

"And sick birds are easier to catch."

The infected cat was found near a ferry terminal on Rügen, a Baltic Sea island north of Berlin, not far from Germany's border with Poland (see map).

In Germany more than a hundred wild birds have died of avian influenza, most of them on Rügen. Authorities there have been rushing to remove bird carcasses in an attempt to stave off incidents like the infection of the housecat.

Cat fanciers are nervous, with various Web sites urging German cat owners to keep their pets indoors. There is also a report that fearful European pet owners may be about to dump large numbers of cats on humane societies.

But scientists and officials are saying there's no need for panic.

"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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