Dog news: Has your beloved pet just become a danger? DOG FLU harmful to humans discovered
A NEW flu virus potentially capable of triggering a worldwide pandemic has been discovered in domestic dogs – raising the horrifying prospect of a mass cull of beloved family pets. One of the biggest killers in history is avian or bird flu – which in a 1918 epidemic claimed 40 MILLION lives.
However the contagion is often initially spread via domesticated pigs as an ‘intermediate host’ – but now a flu-virus capable of being transferred to humans has been found in dogs, making canines a dangerous ‘intermediate host’ for the first time.
When avian flu is detected in the USA mass culls of suspected animals usually ensue.
Although experts are convinced dogs – like pigs – can be vaccinated rather than exterminated, the prospect of a cull of family pets remains a possibility.
Scientists who discovered the dogs with flu viruses that jump the species barrier are warning they have real potential for having a catastrophic impact on humanity.
Research shows how birds and pigs are reservoirs for fatal strains of influenza, with the notorious H5N1 bird flu and H1N1 swine flu responsible for huge loss of life.
More than 200,000 died in the 2009 swine flu outbreak.
Over the past 15 years, a picture of dogs being susceptible to influenza viruses has been slowly emerging.
The first circulating canine flu virus came about after a dog was infected by a horse and then, five years ago, researchers identified an avian-origin H3N2 canine influenza virus circulating in farmed dogs in Guangdong, China.
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Researchers have gone on to map 16 influenza viruses obtained from dogs in the Guangxi region of Southern China, where they are raised for meat but also roam freely to create a complex ecosystem for virus transmission.
Dr Adolfo García-Sastre – director of the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute – told this week how research has discovered that flu viruses are jumping from pigs to dogs and what potential threat that poses to humans after his team’s scientific study appeared in the journal MBIO.
He explained: “The majority of pandemics have been associated with pigs as an intermediate host between avian viruses and human hosts.
"In this study, we identified influenza viruses jumping from pigs into dogs.”
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If there is a lot of immunity against these viruses, they will represent less of a risk
Dr García-Sastre, who is also the principal investigator at the Centre for Research on Influenza Pathogenesis (CRIP), Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York City, went on to warn:
“If there is a lot of immunity against these viruses, they will represent less of a risk, but we now have one more host in which influenza virus is starting to have a diverse genotypic and phenotypic characteristics, creating diversity in a host which is in very close contact to humans.
“The diversity in dogs has increased so much now that the type of combinations of viruses that can be created in dogs represent potential risk for a virus to jump to a dog into a human.”
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Scientists were able to study viruses by collecting them from dogs taken to veterinary clinics suffering from respiratory symptoms.
Their research now throws up the question whether dogs should start being given vaccinations to protect them from influenza like millions of people around the world.
Dr. García-Sastre explained: “The United States is free of avian influenza because every time avian influenza has been detected in poultry in this country, the chickens or turkeys are culled and eliminated from circulation.
“There are attempts to restrict influenza virus in pigs through vaccination and one could consider vaccination for dogs."