Conclusion: It appears that a person could get ebola from her cat or dog but please read on..
Is ebola a zoonotic disease? If it is, it may have a serious impact on the welfare of domestic cats anywhere. I ask because you have probably read that the dog companion, Excalibur, of the Spanish nurse who contracted Ebola was put down and incinerated as he was considered a health risk. Excalibur was destroyed despite a petition of 350,000 people around the world begging the authorities to reconsider their decision.
The nurse, Teresa Romero, 44, was the first person outside of Africa to get the killer disease. As I understand it, about 50% of people who get ebola die from it. There is no cure.
There was no attempt to place the dog into quarantine to see if ebola developed in him thereby confirming a need to euthanise. It was all done in a panic and with a disregard for animal welfare and the views of many others. Other people say the decision to kill the dog was sensible.
Madrid’s regional government obtained a court order to kill the dog. They say that available scientific information cannot rule out the risk of contagion meaning the transmission of ebola from dogs to people.
To date there have been no human ebola infections linked to dogs we are told but how do people know for sure? Dogs are “thought” to contract ebola without symptoms (asymptomatic). If this is true, quarantine would not be beneficial because a dog could just be a carrier without suffering from the disease him/herself.
During an outbreak of ebola in Gabon in 2001-2, 337 dogs were tested and up to 25% had antibodies to the disease meaning they had been exposed to it and the body had created protection.
Ben Neuman a University of Reading virologist says:
“Unlike most viruses, ebola really gets around. It can infect a wide range of animals including bats, rodents, monkeys, apes and a kind of tiny antelope…”
Therefore, we know ebola can infect animals. We don’t know for absolute certainty if it can be transmitted from animals to people, as far as I know (wrong? Please correct me and see CDC statement below).
We don’t know if people can give it to animals but is seems possible or probable. That gap in knowledge needs to be filled I believe. However, if there is a possibility, and what Ben Neuman says indicates that there is, ebola may be zoonotic and therefore it could be transmitted from dogs and cats to people and vice versa.
In fact CDC (USA agency) states on their website:
….researchers have hypothesized that the first patient becomes infected through contact with an infected animal
Chris Kilham writing on Fox news states:
health officials…are certain that it is zoonotic
This is potentially bad news for cats. However, Dee (a regular to PoC) writes in a comment:
According to this week’s Time Magazine, cats are suspected of having immunity to Ebola. This seems to be based on the fact that no cat, even in the wild in Africa, has ever presented with the virus.
We should recognize that the spread of the disease in Sierra Leone is due to a lack of education and poor health care services in that country – a human generated problem in part due to civil war. Also, the international community has been too slow to respond in providing aid on the ground.
There is argument for a lock-down on travel from West Africa to prevent this killer disease spreading to other countries.
Photo credit: NIAID
Very informative, thank you for the article <3
Well considering its been around since 1970’s without spreading since then. I guess its best to not let it Spread. I hear there was a Case in NZ of a Nurse Returning and the Nurse in Australia was Negative I guess its about taking precautions that we are all safe. I do think they need some sort of screening things with People Going on Planes esp in Huge amounts. I mean who would want to go to that Country with so much infection.
|’Perhaps ebola is a reminder that nature is bigger and more powerful than us even though humans believe the opposite.’
Another jolly morsel of info:
THS IS THE END (title)
‘We are doomed, all of us. That in itself isn’t news: our sun, after all, will balloon up into an Earth-engulfing red giant in 5 billion years. The news is that we – life on Earth, that is – are doomed to expire in 1 billion years, maybe 1.5 billion, depending on whether we succumb to starvation or over-heating first.
These cheerful calculations come courtesy of climatologists Ken Caldeira and James Kasting, who figured it all out “just for fun,” says Caldeira. Their reasoning goes like this: the sun is slowly growing brighter, heating the Earth more intensely over time. This increases the chemical weathering of silicate rocks, which go on to react with carbon dioxide to form calcium carbonate, the stuff of seashells. The more weathering, then, the more carbon dioxide gets sucked out of the atmosphere. Remove enough carbon dioxide from the air and you put a stop to photosynthesis, the energy-capturing activity of plants that all life relies on, except for a few species of bacteria.
Actually, Caldeira is optimistic about life’s surviving this first hurdle, which should crop up in a billion years’ time. “Presently existing organisms won’t be able to survive, but my guess is that something will evolve that’s more efficient at extracting carbon dioxide from the environment,” he says.
But even this new generation of living things will find it hard to deal with the climatic consequences of removing all that CO2. As atmosphere CO2 declines, the world will grow cooler. But once there’s no CO2 left to remove, temperatures will start to spiral upward, due to the sun’s continuing increase in radiance.
“There’s a real physical limit to life at high temperatures because proteins break down rapidly,” Caldeira notes, (By his computer, things should be too hot to handle at 1.5 billion years.) “Even if something cold get around that, the Earth’s going to lose its water. That’s pretty tough to deal with.”
The water-losing bit comes right after the infernal heat bit. As temperatures rise, more and more of Earth’s water will migrate to the stratosphere, where ultraviolet radiation will break it up, freeing the hydrogen, which will promptly drift off into space. In one billion more years Earth will be as waterless as Venus.
If this all sounds pretty gloomy, consider that a 1982 calculation had all life ending only 100 million years from now. (The 900 million year reprieve came mostly from Caldeira and Kasting’s more realistic modeling of the effect of carbon dioxide on the Earth’s temperature.) “In either case, it’s a ways off,’ says Caldera. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m more worried about our getting through the next few decades.”‘ – written by Rose Mestel for the magazine Earth (italics,) July 1993
Not to despair, though. Astrophysicists theorize there are other potentially earth-like planets for us to gum up, the nearest being @ six to thirteen years from Earth.
This seems to be a public calming measure but it is quite easily transmitted as far as I am concerned. Anyway the consequences are so dire any risk is significant.
I have this feeling that we are learning about ebola on the job.
Perhaps ebola is a reminder that nature is bigger and more powerful than us even though humans believe the opposite.
Great overview, Dee —
Although you’re trained in all these complexities, I am not, and would have imagined that ebola is catchable if someone infected handled the companion animal.
Radio broadcasts keep hammering home a couple of points: one of them being that ebola is ‘not easily transmitted.’
Come again?
Could have sworn health care providers have said for years that AIDS can be transmitted only through blood and other ‘bodily fluids’ encountered in the horizontal. But then they go on to say that ebola is transmitted through sweat. And hands usually have some small degree of moisture – no? And this falls under the heading of low-risk contagion?
Other satellite news flashes:
(1) @ 145 Liberians are entering the U.S. every day.
(2) ‘Airport inspections’ are pure PR designed to calm a jittery public. No ‘screening’ can prevent epidemics, least of taking the temperature of people wanting to board a flight. Aspirin hides the fever.
(3) Dallas, Nebraska and Seattle hospitals are quarantining ebola patients.
(4) One of the leading health care officials in the U.S. (forget his name) said ‘No..we cannot say its transmission beyond Africa is impossible. Only that it’s “unlikely.”‘ (Famous last words.)
5) ‘Protective garb’ is another delusion. It doesn’t work.
A fun way to die? Blood oozing from the mouth and eyes? Raging fever? Dehydration? Vomiting and diarrhea? Convulsions?
Well, Mother Earth will rejoice. Nearly 8 billion people is too many. Maybe their disappearance will give the poor wildlife – crowded out of the picture – a chance to recover.
Perhaps the truth is that we are still leaning about ebola. That seems to be what is happening. If so it is a bad time to learn.