A tiger at New York’s Bronx Zoo has tested positive for COVID-19, the institution said on Sunday, and is believed to have contracted the virus from a caretaker who was asymptomatic at the time.
The four-year-old Malayan tiger named Nadia, along with her sister Azul, two Amur tigers and three African lions, developed dry coughs and are expected to fully recover, the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the city’s zoos, said in a statement.
“We tested the cat out of an abundance of caution and will ensure any knowledge we gain about COVID-19 will contribute to the world’s continuing understanding of this novel coronavirus,” the statement said.
Photo: AFP / Julie Larsen Maher / Wildlife Conservation Society
“Though they have experienced some decrease in appetite, the cats at the Bronx Zoo are otherwise doing well under veterinary care and are bright, alert, and interactive with their keepers,” it said. “It is not known how this disease will develop in big cats since different species can react differently to novel infections, but we will continue to monitor them ... and anticipate full recoveries.”
All four of the zoos and the aquarium in New York City — where the virus death toll has topped 4,000 — have been closed to the public since March 16.
The Bronx Zoo emphasized that there is “no evidence that animals play a role in the transmission of COVID-19 to people other than the initial event in the Wuhan [China] market, and no evidence that any person has been infected with COVID-19 in the US by animals, including by pet dogs or cats.”
According to the US Department of Agriculture Web site there had “not been reports of pets or other animals” in the US falling ill with coronavirus prior to news of tiger Nadia.
A pet cat was discovered infected with the novel coronavirus in Belgium late last month, following similar cases in Hong Kong where two dogs tested positive. All of those animals are believed to have contracted the virus from the people they live with.
Veterinarian Sarah Caddy, a clinical research fellow at the University of Cambridge, said that since domestic cats had been shown to be potentially susceptible to the virus, the tiger becoming infected was “not wholly unexpected.”
“However, it is surprising that the tiger has become infected with what must have been a fairly low dose of virus — we can assume the tiger did not have continual close contact with the asymptomatic zoo keeper,” she said. “The bottom line is that there is no evidence that any cat, large or small, can transmit [the] virus back to humans.”
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS