A study suggests that pets can catch Covid from their owners.

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Thursday, 12th August 2021

According to research, covid is common in pet cats and dogs whose owners have the disease.

Swabs were collected from 310 pets in 196 households where a human infection had been discovered.

Six cats and seven dogs tested positive for virus antibodies, while six cats and seven dogs tested positive for PCR.

"If you have Covid, you should avoid contact with your cat or dog, just as you would with other people," Utrecht University's Dr Els Broens advised.

"The main concern is not the health of the animals, but the possibility that pets will act as a reservoir for the virus and reintroduce it into the human population."

According to the study's authors, no evidence of pet-to-owner transmission has been documented to date, but it would be difficult to detect while the virus is still easily spread between humans.

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Most infected pets are asymptomatic or have mild Covid symptoms.

Utrecht University researchers dispatched a mobile veterinary clinic to households in the Netherlands that had tested positive for Covid at some point in the previous 200 days.

Swabs were taken from their pet cats and dogs to test for evidence of a current infection, and blood samples were tested for antibodies indicating a previous exposure to Covid.

The findings were made public at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases:

4.2% had evidence of a current infection.

Antibodies were found in 17.4 percent of the participants.

Follow-up tests revealed that all of the PCR-positive (polymerase chain reaction) animals recovered from the infection and developed antibodies.

According to the researchers, human-to-human virus transmission is more likely than animal-to-human virus transmission.

"We can't say there's a 0% chance of owners catching Covid from their pets," Dr. Broens of the Veterinary Microbiological Diagnostic Centre said.

"At the moment, the pandemic is still being driven by human-to-human infections, so we would simply miss it."

Veterinarians in Russia have begun immunising some animals against the disease.

Dr. Broens, on the other hand, stated, "I don't see the scientific evidence for that right now

"It appears unlikely that pets are involved in the pandemic."

The News Talkie Bureau

Source

BBC