Report of infected cats in Indon

To: "Indonesian Environment Information Center (PILI)"

Web @ http://www.pili.or.id/

Sunday Oct 08, 2006

Howdy,

I've been involved with H5N1 education and prevention
for many years now.

Afer reading two sources concerning PILI research on
mammalian H5 infection (stray cats), implicating an
alternative non-avian source of H5N1 human infections
in Indonesia, I'm wondering if H5 sequence data from
cats matches the human H5 sequences of those Javanese
who were recently infected/killed -- in other words,
are we seeing the same H5 strain infecting both cats
and humans. If this is so, human H5 infections might
be due to a reservoir other than poultry -- possibly a
mammalian combo (eg. pigs, stray dogs, etc)!?!

Cheers:*) and Aloha pumehana -- Jon

1ne) Recombinomics Dot Com -- H5N1 in Cats in
Indonesia

October 7, 2006

http://www.recombinomics.com/News/10070601/H5N1_Indonesia_Cats.html

2wo) EffectMeasure Dot Com -- Report of infected cats
in Indon

Posted on: October 7, 2006

http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2006/10/report_of_infected_cats_i…

I can't get it at that link, but found it here:
http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11352
And it sounds different to me than your summary.
More like a birder's meeting where the cats are
only mentioned to exonerate the migratory birds.

An FAO team reportedly found H5N1-infected cats in Indonesia during 2005, so this isn't a new phenomenon there.

Another related development of interest are contemporaneous reports that researchers at the Veterinary Faculty at Udayana University have confirmed H5N1 from at least two "sick pigs" in Bali. http://www.tempointeractive.com/hg/nasional/2006/10/06/brk,20061006-855…

If the illness observed in these pigs was caused by H5N1 and not from another unrelated ailment, this is a highly significant finding.

Although H5N1 has been confirmed from pigs in Indonesia and several other countries during the past three years, all known cases reportedly involved apparent asymptomatic infections.

Zo Kun: We reported on the cats and pigs several times here. Peter Roeder from FAO was allegedly making a cat survey but we've not seen any results. We wonder if this is part of such a survey. Andrew Jeremijenko also found virus in a kitten, reported here as well. But we don't have any papers from these endeavors yet. That cats can be infected has been known for some time. It remains a question whether they are a significant reservoir and if so, whether they are a vector or a source for a vector to humans or other animals.

Not to beat a dead horse, but (sorry, Ed) I keep thinking that poultry has been proven not to be a significant source of H5N1 infection in humans...at least not directly...based on the recently published article in this blog that said 80% of Indonesia's 55 million people are in daily contact with poultry, and of these poultry 27% are infected with H5N1. This means that approx 12 million Indonesians are in daily contact with these walking, clucking H5N1 reservoirs, and yet only 69 (or so) of them so far have caught the virus. The probability of them catching it from chickens is thus so low as to be almost non-existent. I wish scientists would seek more data like this on cats, pigs, dogs and other possible reservoirs or vectors. Like how many Indonesians are in daily contact with cats, and of these cats how many are infected with H5N1? Same with pigs and dogs. Let's look for the statistically significant carrier: It seems like an enormous amount of research focus is still on a dead end. The birds may be reservoirs, but they are not the vectors. Time to start really looking for other possible causes before time runs out.

oops, I just reread the article. That's 55 million HOUSEHOLDS, not people. 220 million people. That actually makes the odds even four times as low that chickens are giving H5N1 directly to people in Indonesia. So what is?

It is irrational to hold onto the idea that just because lots and lots of poultry are sick, they are the source of infection in humans, when only about .00015% of the people actually exposed to H5N1 in infected chickens actually come down with the disease. Being a reservoir and being a source of infection are not the same thing. B2B, sure! B2H, no. Let it go. It doesn't hold up.

MiH: There are two competing possibilities being portrayed here. One is that there is massive exposure but transmission to humans from that exposure is very rare. This is the poultry being the main source case. There is nothing biologically implausible about this. We see it with carcinogens and other examples. The second possibility is that there is another reservoir/vector combination that no one knows about where the probabilityof transmission is much higher. This is also possible and not biologically implausible. It would be prudent to look hard to confirm or eliminate this possibility, too. At this point you can argue for either because we don't have the data.

I'm still leaning to the poultry source as the main reservoir but as I have said here often, we don't know this as yet and I don't think most of the cases being assigned to poultry really show that poultry is the source. But they don't really try to do this, they just assume it because that's easier. It doesn't mean that assigning poultry a the souce for insufficient or bad reasons isn't correct, it just means they have taken the easy way to dispose of the question.

It is not reasonable to abandon the poultry reservoir (it has more evidence than any other possibility but also evidence that doesn't fit if you make other assumptions) and more than it is reasonable to hold on to it as the only possibility. Everything is on the table at this point, IMO.

Remember, this is a virus that can exist in birds' guts. Cats eat birds raw, guts and all. Humans don't. So birds could be an efficient reservoir of virus for infecting cats directly, but not humans. Since cats are mammals. a virus in a cat would have a chance to adapt to mammalian receptors and to a mammalian immune system. Then, the cats' owners could then catch the flu from their pets. Birds could be the ultimate reservoir, but human infection could be mediated through cats.

I find myself puzzling over this virus every day as I commute. I was thinking about the fact that cats have apparently contracted the virus by eating raw infected poultry...and was wondering how the virus was able to
survive the stomach acids, which are generally a first line of defense against most microbes ingested with food. Isn't this pretty unusual? Could there be another explanation for how the virus entered the cat's bloodstream from its chicken dinner without passing through the stomach? (The fact that the virus is in the bird's gut is immaterial, as it probably didn't get there via the digestive process...unless the bird was eating some kind of bug that was a carrier. (Chickens around here, which are largely free range scavengers rather than penned and grain fed, will eat centipedes, cockroaches and just about anything else small enough to swallow.)

I'm also still struck by the relative ease with which this virus passes from infected human to human, once a human gets it, with fairly strong evidence that in this case the infection route is airborne, via the respiratory tract. I keep feeling like there is some piece of the puzzle just out of reach, some logical link that we are overlooking that could make sense of so many seemingly disparate facts.

As far as I know cats who have had a nice dinner will lick themselves from head to toe, to spread the odour of their meal. Some virus in their mouth will not be killed by saliva and will be spread all over their hairy skin. How long is it necessary to last to infect other mammals? The virus can survive at least 4 to 8 hours on a surface.
One cat sometimes licks another to express a friendly attitude, especially cats in the same houshold.
And they can wipe their mouths clean by stroking some corner (of a box, shelf) using their little heads. Mine also do this when they are hungry and when I am preparing their meal. How much interval time must be between a contaminated meal and next dinner time to have a virus disappeared?
Also cats are playing with other animals, or with parts of potential food. Feathers are favourite to some cats.
Some cats take a prey back home and drop it on the floor or on a bed to please a person they are attached to.
Or, like one of my former cats did, they take it home alive and if they can they finish it in a bloody mass in the living.
We can't mark a viral particle and observe it the way it goes.
But I can assume by looking at some common behaviour sequences how one can be infected by a virus.
I can understand cats are a vector in spreading H5N1.

Revere, I think you have a point in that they try to dispose of a question the easy way. Much more could be asked, observed, processed in trying to build a realistic model of the possibilities of infection. And people have to cooperate on that by sharing all information.

MiH: We posted a bit on this on the old site. The virus can pass the stomach pH barrier, which may be surprising but seems to be the case. here is the other post.

Many have been concerned about a hidden mammalian vector (incubator) of H5N1 which is allowing selective adaption to humans. This is of interest in Indonesia in that human sequences don't match avian sequences but do match cat sequences. This is the evidence that has confirmed previously stated concerns.

Many potential vectors have been discussed and recently, it has been confirmed that H5N1 can be present in pig populations asymptomatically, in several countries. However, we do not know how well it can transmit within pig farms.

The point I would make is that cats and particularly wild cats are highly effective predators. For that reason, I do not believe the cats are the hidden mammalian vector we have been looking for, but are an intermediary between the hidden vector and humans.

It would be difficult to dispel bats as the index mammal considering they were the index in SARS and Nipah virus, both zoonoses.

However, an alternative for consideration would be all food sources of cats including birds, rats, mice, moles etc...and I would not rule out the pigs either given their close association with previous pandemics.

Sorry, I forgot to mention small shore-line mammals that would be in close contact with migratory waterfowl and in many cases contact both faeces and have them as one food source.

You write on how cats could be infected by another sorce
You have large infestations of bed bugs in the poultry houses plus other vectors that could transmit while they are feedeing

If anthrax, plauge, typhus plus others can be transmitted by bed bugs and these will feed off other birds cats dog humans so on they atre not going thru the digestive track or dried fecal matter thru the lungs

You will not see the bed bugs during the day are they being overlooked as the vector that is spreading from Migratory birds and other local birds that feed in the poultry operations
Then are passed on to other host when the [poultry is sold or captured by a animal such as a cat

You also have a bat bed bug from what Ihave read they have found many things such as thiought under controll in bat populations Cats eat bats to

Kavak Yelleri

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9878612

http://vir.sgmjournals.org/cgi/content/full/86/4/1121

Here is a UK paper on all of the species... Rats and mice are really cool on this one as are the birds themselves. Rats and mice test positive on day 3, but not on day five. But they have high concentrations of the bug in their bodies. Kind of like a four legged nasty little vector machine. Not a lot of info on the cross infection capabilities.

http://www.defra.gov.uk/animalh/diseases/monitoring/pdf/hpai-avianmamma…

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