You Don’t Want Your Cat to Catch This

The bird flu that has forced hundreds of cats into quarantine in New York City may not be that big of a deal — but other strains of bird flu are currently marching across Europe that infectious disease experts say we must watch carefully.

Felines remain in lockdown in the Big Apple after the avian flu was first discovered in a Manhattan shelter in December. The highly contagious but low-risk strain has since turned up at shelters in Queens and Brooklyn. The virus has also infected at least one veterinarian, according to officials with the New York City Health Department.

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This is the first time the H7N2 strain of the virus, commonly found in birds, has infected domestic cats. No one is sure how the cats contracted the virus or how it so quickly spread. Symptoms are generally mild, and include sneezing, coughing, and runny eyes and noses. People can potentially get the same flu by touching virus-containing secretions from the cat and then touching their eyes, nose, or mouth.

Infectious disease expert Meghan May, an associate professor of microbiology and infectious diseases at the University of New England College of Medicine, said that while the quarantine and H7N2 virus may sound scary, this particular strain causes a garden variety case of the flu.

There is no need to panic, she told LifeZette. But there is reason to take precautions. Thoroughly washing one’s hands can help reduce the risk of disease transmission between people and pets.

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“Influenza is always a point of concern, even if the majority of us would only experience a minor illness. Young babies, the elderly, asthmatics, and the immunocompromised are going to experience a more severe disease, so we always pay attention in order to protect these folks,” said May.

Influenza viruses are also always changing, so a current low risk could lead someday to a different scenario.

May added that a highly pathogenic strain of the bird flu making its way across Asia and Europe, H5N8, does concern her. She recorded her thoughts on it a few months back when it broke out in a zoo in India.

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So far, it has not been reported in humans. Yet it does seem to mutate and change its capabilities far faster than an average flu strain.

“As it moves into more densely populated areas, this raises alarm bells for me,” said May. “Because it is a high-path strain, it is predictable that any human patients would have a pretty high chance of dying.”

China just reported another human death from the H7N9 strain of the bird flu. That country’s last major outbreak killed 36 people and caused more than $6 billion in losses for the agricultural sector. The U.S. just shipped nearly 3 million eggs to South Korea, which has been hit hard by the bird flu in recent months. Another bird flu strain in Bulgaria has local health officials killing hundreds of thousands of birds to try to wipe out the virus. Croatia has banned all outdoor poultry and started culling birds with its own outbreak of H5N8; the same is true of France.

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Health officials in the U.S. are on high alert for any H5 bird flu outbreaks — especially as a number of large poultry farms hit hard in 2014 and 2015 by the bird flu are only now fully recovering.

A type of bird flu was found just last week in a wild duck in Montana that appeared to match one of the strains found during the last outbreak, prompting even more concern. But no U.S. poultry has been found to be sick or dead from the disease in connection with the latest discovery, according to the USDA.