'Pets are at risk of COVID-19 infection from their owners, not the other way round': Study

Coronavirus is common in pet cats and dogs whose owners have the disease, a research has said contradicting the belief that it is the other way round. The research was conducted by experts from Utrecht University in the Netherlands who tested companion animals for coronavirus. While they found that a majority of animals had contracted the infection, they said that no evidence of pet-to-human transmission was found. 

All animals were swabbed

The team of experts from Utrecht University sent a mobile veterinary clinic to households across the Netherlands that had tested positive for COVID at some point in the past 200 days. They then took swab samples of 310 pets in 196 households where at least one human has contracted the infection. The samples were then tested and as it turned out, six cats and 7 dogs came out positive on the PCR test. Additionally, an overwhelming 54 pets were reported to have the presence of virus antibodies inside them.

“If you have Covid, you should avoid contact with your cat or dog, just as you would do with other people," Dr. Els Broens, from Utrecht University, said."The main concern is not the animals' health but the potential risk that pets could act as a reservoir of the virus and reintroduce it into the human population," she added presenting the results of the study at European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases. 

The research also found out that most infected pets tend to be asymptomatic or display mild COVID symptoms. Later, the team conducted follow-up tests on the infected animals and showed that all of them recovered and developed antibodies against the virus. While initially it was deemed that animals infect humans, recent studies have shown that the most likely route of virus transmission is from human to animal. According to BBC, Russian vets have already acted upon it and started vaccinating pets. 

The COVID-19 disease, which oriiginatedinChinese city of Wuhan has now jumped international borders to infect over 187,388,352 people, out of whom 4,045,337 have lost their lives and 171,346,954 have recovered. The pathogen has mutated into four major variants and its sub-variants. 

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