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Study confirms cats can become infected with and may transmit COVID-19 to other cats:
Professor of Pathobiological Sciences at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine Yoshihiro Kawaoka led the study, in which researchers administered to three cats SARS-CoV-2 isolated from a human patient. The following day, the researchers swabbed the nasal passages of the cats and were able to detect the virus in two of the animals. Within three days, they detected the virus in all of the cats.
The day after the researchers administered virus to the first three cats, they placed another cat in each of their cages. Researchers did not administer SARS-CoV-2 virus to these cats.
Each day, the researchers took nasal and rectal swabs from all six cats to assess them for the presence of the virus. Within two days, one of the previously uninfected cats was shedding virus, detected in the nasal swab, and within six days, all of the cats were shedding virus. None of the rectal swabs contained virus.
Each cat shed SARS-CoV-2 from their nasal passages for up to six days. The virus was not lethal and none of the cats showed signs of illness. All of the cats ultimately cleared the virus.
"That was a major finding for us -- the cats did not have symptoms," says Kawaoka, who also holds a faculty appointment at the University of Tokyo. Kawaoka is also helping lead an effort to create a human COVID-19 vaccine called CoroFlu.
Peter J. Halfmann, Masato Hatta, Shiho Chiba, Tadashi Maemura, Shufang Fan, Makoto Takeda, Noriko Kinoshita, Shin-ichiro Hattori, Yuko Sakai-Tagawa, Kiyoko Iwatsuki-Horimoto, Masaki Imai, Yoshihiro Kawaoka. Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in Domestic Cats. New England Journal of Medicine, 2020; DOI: 10.1056/NEJMc2013400
(Score: 5, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday May 15 2020, @04:13PM (6 children)
Viruses may piggyback, but they don't grow enough to start shedding in infectious quantity unless they have a host with the right target configuration to grow in. This is called host range. It doesn't matter if a crossbreed host is exposed, usually, unless the cells of the host being jumped to are similar enough to allow the viruses to invade, get what they need to propagate, then do so. This is not common. Usually the other species is different enough that the virus can't replicate and the immune system of the attempted jump destroys the virus because it can't get a foothold. There are exceptions, though. [nih.gov]
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @06:03PM (2 children)
The study only says they did nose and ass swabs. That doesn't equal an infection, only that the virus was detected in a nose swab. It didn't say anything about a blood or antibody test to confirm an infection... vs a piggyback.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday May 16 2020, @03:11AM
It's been confirmed before. Numerous articles on this site; here's the first one:
https://www.wormsandgermsblog.com/2020/03/articles/animals/cats/covid-19-in-a-cat-belgium/ [wormsandgermsblog.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday May 18 2020, @02:10PM
Which doesn't change that a statement that a virus will, "probably piggyback on any animal," is still false, and we now virology doesn't work that way. A host must still be receptive in order for the virus to grow enough to detectably shed. Unless one means an animal may track virus particles from here to there.... which then depends on many other factors but generally viruses die reasonably rapidly outside of a viable host which is usually hours. In COVID-19, though, that time is measured in days. But again, this is not the normal way viruses live. Cold and flu, for example, are measured in hours at most for life-outside-host.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Saturday May 16 2020, @03:13AM (2 children)
Rabies leaps to mind... not real fussy about its hosts.
[Occurs to me to wonder if slow replication and broad host range go hand in hand.]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday May 18 2020, @01:56PM (1 child)
Interesting thought. It's not that there aren't quite a few diseases that do have significant host range. Many influenza strains do. COVID-19 is thought to have had an animal origin / spillover infection. But in terms of general biology, just because different species are exposed to a virus does not mean that the other animal will/must serve as a viable reservoir for the disease (as OP seemed to imply).
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday May 18 2020, @03:40PM
Just blowing around ideas here, but... Now that I think about it, I want to see a chart comparing:
Host range
Replication speed (does slower mean less immune response and perhaps more ability to infect different hosts? so it would seem)
Ability to live outside the body (from viruses I know about, seems like that's inverse to both host range and replication speed)
Might be that the slower it oozes into a population, the less likely it is to be ejected (assuming an otherwise-susceptible biology) and the more time it has to find a niche, but also that this selects for fragile viruses (less need to survive in the environment).
At the far end of the scale, there's canine parvovirus, which can cause fullblown disease within 72 hours and can survive in the environment for a year or so. Perhaps not coincidentally, as few as six particles suffices to infect. But its host range is pretty narrow.
When I was a young biochem/microbiology major, virology was a single class. How complex it's since become!!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.