The first case of transmission of the SarsCoV2 virus from a cat to a human being has been documented: it happened in southern Thailand, where the feline of a Covid-positive family would have infected the veterinarian by sneezing in her face.
The confirmation came from the study of viral genomes, published in Emerging Infectious Diseases by researchers at the Prince of Songkla University.
From the early months of the pandemic it was known that cats could be infected by humans without developing severe symptoms.
Until now, however,
it had never been shown that the contagion could also come in the opposite direction, that is, from animal to man
.
"We've known for two years that this was one of the possibilities," says Angela Bosco-Lauth, an infectious disease expert at Colorado State University, in Nature.
Considering the widespread use of cats as pets, the fact that it took so long to demonstrate this could mean that cat-to-human infection is not all that common: according to experts
there is currently no type of alarm
, because the virus is even more likely to pass from humans to animals.