Well, what do you expect when cats eat birds? As if bird weren't enough to worry about, maybe H5N1 should be aka cat flu.
"The prevalence of the virus is quite high" judging from preliminary tests on swabs of the cats' upper airways, C.A. Nidom, a scientist at Airlangga University in Surabaya, said in a telephone interview on Feb. 28. Nidom found H5N1 in 98 of 500 cats living near poultry markets in high-risk areas on the island of Java and in Lampung province on southern Sumatra island.
There have been concerns about cats for some time, originally brought forward in Feb 2006 by a scientist named Andrew Jeremijenko, but the extent of the problem, at least in high risk geographic areas, has been under-appreciated by many. You can assume if there's a SE Asian live bird market where H5N1 is found, and there are cats in the vicinity, that's a risk area.
This is an important story for many reasons. At its core, it highlights the difficulty of just 'getting rid' of the H5N1 virus. That's the idea of culling chickens... remove the virus host, give prophylactic tamiflu (a tamiflu 'blanket') to the surrounding community, and hope you stamped out a pocket of viral mutation, thereby preventing millions of human deaths around the world. This is work that literally goes on every day by international public health people (talk about unsung heroes). Yet, how realistically can you expect people to comply?
And if you're talking about applying that strategy to mammals... well, you can't. It's hard enough to ask Indonesians to bury their food supply. And when you add this, it gets even harder.
"We are very worried," an Indonesian official told Intellectual Property Watch, adding that there is an "unfair mechanism" regarding the sharing of samples of viruses. Some manufacturers will use the samples to develop vaccines, but there is no guarantee that poor developing countries such as Indonesia would be provided with the vaccine, as manufacturers’ production capacity is only 40 million, he said, referring to the more than 6 billion people in the world. There is a "high gap in demand and supply," he said.
So, if you want some insight into the current negotiations between Indonesia and WHO as to whether there'll be a vaccine developed from a virus that Indonesia provides to the first world, that Indonesians cannot afford to buy for themselves, pet the cat and think about it.
In the meantime, Revere at Effect Effect Measure has compiled recent H5N1 headlines in a 24 hour period:
Headlines in the last day: South Korea records seventh outbreak; Bird Flu Strikes Hanoi, Over 1,000 Chickens Culled; Bird flu erupts in Vietnam south; total 5 provinces infected; Bird flu found in 6 more areas of Afghanistan; Laos teenager dies from bird flu; Indonesian Villagers Hide Birds And Spread Flu; Myanmar takes preventive measures against bird flu; Southern China is epicenter of bird flu, U.S. researchers find; Suspicious bird flu deaths in Tehran's Pardisan Park; World experts in Kuwait as more bird flu cases detected; Dubai plans bird flu blood tests at airport -- Report: plan to make 80,000 passengers arriving daily pass through temperature scanners; Ulster tourist tested for killer flu.
H5N1 is a problem that hasn't gone away.