As bird flu spreads, disease trackers turn their attention to pets

Trupanion, a Seattle-based pet insurance company, is partnering with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to create a system to track pet illnesses, the company announced this week. The system will utilize insurance claims submitted to Trupanion in real time as infirmed dogs and cats visit the vet.

“The concept is to proactively detect potential threats to pets and public health,” said Dr. Steve Weinrauch, chief veterinary and product officer at Trupanion.

The effort, which also involves academic researchers and other pet industry companies, is still in its early stages. It will initially focus on bird flu, a virus that is spreading among U.S. dairy cows and has been transmitted to domestic cats.

“This is a really critical public-private partnership that will lend a hand fill some critical gaps,” said Dr. Casey Barton Behravesh, who directs the CDC’s Office of One Health, which focuses on the links between human, animal and environmental health.

It’s one of several ongoing efforts to fill such gaps, which extend far beyond bird flu. Like most other countries, the United States lacks a comprehensive national system for tracking disease in companion animals. While the CDC is responsible for protecting human health and the Department of Agriculture focuses on farm animals, companion animals tend to get overlooked.

“This is a population that’s kind of lost in the crowd,” said Dr. Jennifer Granick, a veterinary internist at the University of Minnesota who is one of the founders of a separate effort to create a disease surveillance system for companion animals.

It’s a public health blind spot that puts both animals and people at risk, experts say. Many infectious diseases — including bird flu, Covid-19 and MPox — are zoonotic, meaning they can jump from animals to people and back again. And there are few animals with which people come into closer contact than those in their homes.

Companion animals also act as a bridge between the natural and human worlds and can act as guardians of shared health risks.

“I think if you had to pick one group of animals to invest in and really get good health information in, it would be pets.” said Dr. Sarah Hamer, a veterinary epidemiologist at Texas A&M University.

Pet Pathogens

Scientists have known for years that cats are susceptible to bird flu, which they can catch by hunting infected wild birds. But the dairy epidemic has created recent threats; since delayed March dozens of cases of bird flu confirmed in American cats, some of which were infected after drinking milk containing the virus. (Other cases were more mysterious, including several recently reported (infections in domestic cats with no known exposure to the virus.)

Bird flu infections in all mammals are a cause for concern, giving the virus a chance to evolve into a greater threat to humans. “But I think it’s really critical that we focus primarily on cats,” said Kristen Coleman, an infectious disease researcher at the University of Maryland.

Cats infected by wild birds can bring the virus home, transmitting it to their owners, while cats circulating on dairy farms can carry the virus off the farm, transmitting it to wild animals.

But so far, cats have been a bit of a sideshow in bird flu surveillance. “Most of the funding — government funding, anyway — goes to surveillance of people and dairy cattle,” said Dr. Coleman, who is working to establish a flu surveillance program in animal shelters. “And I see a gap there for companion animals.”

There have been many obstacles to creating surveillance systems for companion animals. Historically, many veterinarians have worked in solo practices, keeping records in their own idiosyncratic way. (Standard diagnostic codes are not widely used in veterinary medicine.)

And when it comes to monitoring disease in animals, many countries, including the United States, have prioritized farm animals. “Governments just aren’t putting any money into monitoring companion animals,” said Dr. Scott Weese, an infectious disease veterinarian at the University of Guelph in Ontario.

At times, that left experts scrambling to think about potential recent threats. After veterinarians across the United States began reporting an escalate in the number of dogs with dog cough last fall, headlines warned that a mysterious recent canine disease could sweep the country.

But respiratory illnesses are periodically on the rise in dogs. The lack of surveillance meant there was no strenuous data on how many dogs were infirmed last fall—or how unusual any escalate might be. “It really ties our hands as we try to solve these problems and figure out whether the signal is noise,” said Dr. Weese, who is one of the experts working on the recent surveillance program led by Trupanion.

After months of fevered speculation, the wave of dog coughing had subsided, with no evidence that a recent dog disease had gripped the country.

Real-time results

Advances in technology and changes in the veterinary industry, including the development of huge chains of veterinary practices and the increasing utilize of pet insurance, have made it feasible to collect huge amounts of pet health data.

Trupanion now insures more than 1 million pets, and more than 10,000 clinics in North America utilize the company’s software to file insurance claims. A spike in claims for coughing dogs in California or feverish cats in Novel York could be an early sign of a disease outbreak. In the long term, the company hopes to build a system that can automatically flag such aberrations, Dr. Weinrauch said. But it will start with more targeted research, such as scouring data for signs that bird flu may be spreading in cats.

At the University of Minnesota, Dr. Granick and her colleagues developed Companion Animal Veterinary Surveillance Networkor CAVSNET, which automatically collects electronic medical records from veterinary practices across the country. The system, which currently receives data monthly from about 1,400 clinics, is not yet equipped to detect outbreaks in real time, Dr. Granick said.

But it was inspired by a similar system in Great Britain, Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Networkor SAVSNET, which provided proof of principle. The network, run by a diminutive team at the University of Liverpool, receives veterinary records and laboratory test results from across the country, often in almost in real time.

“There’s a map of the UK that says, ‘A cat has just been seen vomiting,’ ‘A dog has just been seen with a respiratory illness,’” said Dr Alan Radford, an animal infectious disease expert and SAVSNET researcher.

In January 2020, when a Liverpool vet called to report seeing a number of vomiting dogs, Dr. Radford and his colleagues were able to to confirm quickly that the outbreak was real. Over the next few months, the team conducted a full epidemiological investigation, regularly updating the public and linking the outbreak to new variety typically soft canine virus. The outbreak ended in April.

Once up and running, these kinds of surveillance systems could yield a wide range of insights. For example, Dr. Granick and her colleagues are already analyzing CAVSNET records to learn more about antibiotic prescribing practices in veterinary medicine. As in human medicine and agriculture, overusing antibiotics in companion animals could lead to the emergence of drug-resistant superbugs.

In some cases, it is easier to track public health threats in pets than in people. Lyme disease, a tick-borne disease that is expanding geographically, affects both dogs and humans. However, dogs are routinely tested for antibodies to the bacteria that cause Lyme disease, whereas humans are not.

AND new studywhich has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, suggests that public health officials may be able to detect rising rates of Lyme disease in dogs up to two years before reports of cases begin to rise in humans. “These diagnoses are occurring in dogs earlier than they are in humans,” said Dr. Audrey Ruple, a veterinary epidemiologist at Virginia Tech and an author of the study.

In the United States, the Companion Animal Parasite Council already tracks the incidence of Lyme disease in dogs, using test results collected from major veterinary laboratories. Each month, the council publishes maps the incidence of Lyme disease and other parasitic diseases in each county.

“Our goal was to let people know what’s in their backyard,” said Dr. Christopher Carpenter, a veterinarian and the council’s executive director.

At the county level, council calculations of Lyme disease rates in dogs are correlated with number of cases in humans, the researchers found. That suggests that even people without pets could utilize the maps to assess their own, ever-evolving risk, Dr. Carpenter said.

Although the council’s disease-tracking efforts focus primarily on parasites, they have begun to include some viral and bacterial diseases, Dr. Carpenter said. “We need to do a lot more surveillance.”