Veterinary services in Cyprus have received a first batch of anti-Covid pills, from a stockpile originally meant for humans, as efforts intensify to stop the spread of a virulent strain of feline coronavirus that has killed thousands of cats.
The island’s health ministry began discharging the treatment on 8 August – long celebrated as International Cat Day – in what is hoped will be the beginning of the end of the disease that has struck the Mediterranean country’s feline population.
“We have taken stock of 500 boxes of medication,” Christodoulos Pipis, the government’s veterinary services director, told the Guardian. “This is the first batch of 2,000 packages that will be made available. Each one contains 40 capsules so we are talking about a total of 80,000 [anti-Covid] pills.”
Distribution of the drugs follows an “alarming increase” in Cyprus of cases of feline infectious peritonitis (FIP) caused by feline coronavirus which, if left untreated, is almost always fatal.
Defined as the “FCoV-23 outbreak”, the virus was first noticed in January in Nicosia, the Cypriot capital. Within three to four months it had spread across “the whole island”, according to the Pancyprian Veterinary Association (PVA).
Experts at the university of Edinburgh, investigating the outbreak in collaboration with the PVA, found that within 12 weeks the number of FIP cases confirmed by PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests rose 20-fold compared with the previous year.
Dr Charalampos Attipa, senior lecturer in veterinary clinical pathology, who is heading the University of Edinburgh team, said: “Our studies are very much focused on identifying the possible mutation that has led to this highly virulent FCoV strain.”
Although the mutated feline virus is not related to Covid-19 and cannot be contracted by humans, molnupiravir, the active ingredient in anti-Covid pills, has proved to be beneficial to cats diagnosed with FIP.
Shed in the faeces of infected cats and then spread through contact, feline coronavirus was first recorded in the 1960s. Outbreaks of FIP, though rare, have previously occurred in the UK, US, Taiwan and Greece, but were always confined to catteries.
In Cyprus the virus appears to have assumed a much more virulent infectious form with even indoor-only pets falling victim.
“This country is a slaughterhouse for animals,” said Zelia Gregoriou, an assistant professor in the education department at the University of Cyprus, who lost her elderly indoor cat to the disease last weekend. “Yes the government has made this announcement, this little firework, but it’s very contradictory because nothing is being done for cats [here]. Instead there is a policy of thanatopolitics, an economy of death, which is how the slaughterhouse works. In reality, they would rather let them die.”
The island’s Cat Protection and Welfare Society (PAWS) recently made the dramatic claim that about 300,000 felines, both domesticated and stray, had…
2023-08-10 08:06:20
Original from www.theguardian.com
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