Public health officials have announced the first cases of feline-to-human tuberculosis (TB) transmission, with two people in England contracting the disease after coming into contact with cats.
Nine cats developed the disease last year in the west Berkshire and Hampshire regions. Of those nine, six were found to live within 250 yards of each other. It's thought that the cats contracted the disease from other mammals, such as badgers or rodents, it's also possible that some of the infected felines caught the disease from each other. "The most likely source of infection is infected wildlife, but cat-to-cat transmission cannot be ruled out," said Professor Noel Smith, the head of the Bovine TB Genotyping Group at the UK's Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratory Agency.
The two cat owners who contracted TB are undergoing treatment, while two others, who contracted a latent form of the disease are progressing normally.
The disease is caused by the Mycobacterium bovis (M bovis) strain, though officials believed the risk of transmission to humans minimal at most. Though the disease has been prevalent in a range of mammals, particularly cattle, for several years, the spread to cats its worrying first in public health concerns.
"It's important to remember that this was a very unusual cluster of TB in domestic cats," said Dilys Morgan, the head of gastrointestinal, emerging and zoonotic diseases at Public Health England. M bovis is still uncommon in cats - it mainly affects livestock animals. These are the first documented cases of cat-to-human transmission, and so although PHE has assessed the risk of people catching this infection from infected cats as being very low, we are recommending that household and close contacts of cats with confirmed M bovis infection should be assessed and receive public health advice."
However, Professor Danielle Gunn-Moore has advised that TB could continue to spread among species, and that more education around the disease is required. "We've all become rather complacent because we haven't been seeing TB for so many years but bovis is back with a little bit more significance," she said. "It's important we don't get blinkered and think it's only badgers and cattle that get infected. This is a bacteria that is not very fussy about who it infects."
