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Bird Flu Found in Weasel-Like Animal

Posted on: Thursday, 9 March 2006, 15:00 CST

BERLIN - A German lab has found the H5N1 bird flu virus in a weasel-like animal called a stone marten, officials said Thursday, marking the disease's spread to another mammal species beyond cats.

The marten, sick and apparently already dying, was found on the north German island of Ruegen, where Germany's bird flu outbreak first appeared earlier this year.

The animal came from near the Wittow Ferry area of the island, the same location where three cats and dozens of wild birds have been found with the disease, according to a statement from the agriculture ministry of the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

Stone martens look like weasels and have brown fur with a white chest patch.

A veterinarian put down the animal and sent its corpse for further testing. The virus was confirmed by the government's Friedrich-Loeffler Institute laboratory.

The rapid spread of the virus in birds throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia has been accompanied by fears it will mutate into a form easily transmissible between humans and cause a worldwide flu pandemic that could disrupt travel and commerce and kill large numbers of people.

"The presence of an H5N1 infection in a second mammalian species is not surprising," Till Backhaus, the regional minister for agriculture, said in a statement, adding martens and cats eat similar prey.

Cats are believed to have caught the virus by eating infected birds. Ulrich Arnold, a scientist at the University of Marburg's Institute for Medical Microbiology, said the discovery was "no new situation for Germany."

He pointed out that during the winter months hungry martens will eat carrion such as dead birds.

German officials have asked that cats be kept indoors and dogs on leashes in areas where bird flu has been found.

Dick Thompson, spokesman for the World Health Organization, said it was too soon to say whether the stone marten infection poses a new threat to humans.

"Further investigation is needed to determine whether evidence of the infection in a new mammalian species has any significant risk for humans," Thompson told the AP.

Erwin Reisinger, the director of the Department of Tropical Medicine at the University of Rostock, said the marten case did not show the virus altering its means of transmission and did not therefore indicate increased risk for people.

But he said the case suggested that the disease could be expected to spread to still further species. He said it could be transmitted to rats, mice and swine, as shown by naturally occurring cases in Southeast Asia or in the laboratory.

According to the World Health Organization tigers and snow leopards in a zoo in Thailand died of H5N1 after being fed infected chicken carcasses in 2003 and 2004.

In addition to the large cats infected in Thailand, three house cats near Bangkok were infected with the virus in February 2004. Officials said one cat ate a dead chicken on a farm where there was a bird flu outbreak, and the virus apparently spread to the others.

WHO said tests on three civets that died in captivity last June in Vietnam also detected H5N1. The source of that infection was unknown.

The organization says that cat populations are not known to be reservoirs of the virus and that cat infections have so far all spread from birds.

Source: Associated Press/AP Online

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