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...Wednesday, the Iowa Department of Public Health reported the first confirmed case of H1N1 in a house pet, a 13-year-old domestic shorthaired cat. The animal likely contracted the virus from its owners, veterinarians say, since two of the three family members living in the cat's household had recently suffered from influenza-like illness. Late last week, when the cat came down with flu-like symptoms - malaise, loss of appetite - its owners brought it to Iowa State University College of Veterinary Medicine for treatment. The family mentioned to the vet that they had also recently battled illness, which...
...clear how vulnerable cats, dogs and other household animals may be to the new virus, but the Iowa cat's case reinforces just how different H1N1 is from seasonal flu viruses. Although some household cats and certain wild cats in zoos have gotten ill with avian influenza, and dogs have their own canine version of the flu virus, pets don't normally get sick with the regular human flu. "There has never been a report of human seasonal influenza affecting cats or dogs," says Dr. Julie Levy, director of Maddie's Shelter Medicine Program at the College of Veterinary Medicine...
...possible that the Iowa cat's case may be a bellwether of future pet disease, but it's also possible it was just a fluke event. At the cat's advanced age, its immune system may not have been as adept at fending off influenza as that of a younger animal - similar to the vulnerability seen in aging humans. Still, says Dr. Ann Garvey, state public-health vet at the Iowa Department of Public Health, "We just don't know, we really don't." (Watch a video about a pet store in Gaza...
Researchers on the study concluded that the actual number of cases hovered anywhere from 1.8 million to 5.7 million cases: far more than the 43,677 lab-confirmed cases that were identified nationwide through July, according to the paper. “Not every case, by a long shot, got reported...Once the number of cases grew, issues of capacity made testing and reporting even more significant,” wrote Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and a co-author of the study, in an e-mail...
...reported on October 23 that the fast-moving “swine flu” pandemic had spread to 177 countries worldwide and that flu activity remains widespread in 46 U.S. states. The latest weekly report from the World Health Organization only accounts for 440,000 laboratory confirmed cases of pandemic H1N1 influenza through the end of October throughout the globe, admitting that the case count is likely to be significantly lower than the actual number of cases as “many countries have stopped counting individual cases...