A Quick Influenza Update

I received an e-mail not long ago about a cat being diagnosed with H1N1 influenza. You will all remember that H1N1 is the "swine" flu as opposed to the H3N8 dog/horse influenza. I've checked into it and there have been a couple of cases of cats and a couple of ferrets with confirmed H1N1.

At risk of sounding redundant: DON'T PANIC!

We know that influenza virus can jump species. It's why we have the H1N1 epidemic to begin with, right? So it stands to reason that there would be instances where the virus jumps from people to cats.

Is it scary? Yes. It is. We always pay close attention when something like this happens. When there are inter-species jumps we always investigate and see if there is any difference in the virus, type of infection, or incidence.

Is it common? No, It's considered rare. I'm sure there are cases out there we don't know about, but if you consider there are two cat cases compared to many thousands of human cases, it's rare.

Has the virus mutated? NO. Genetic analysis says the virus has not changed, it just happened to infect a different species than we would have expected.

I assume we are going to see more of these. The cats and ferrets infected have all recovered from the infection and it is essentially the same story for them as it is in us or dogs.

Interesting...

AMH