More than a dozen cats have been killed or sickened by bird flu that is spreading in raw food products, the Food and Drug Administration says, prompting a federal probe into how the virus got into the pet food supply chain.
“The FDA is aware of reports of death or illness associated with uncooked food in 13 domestic cats in eight households, 1 exotic cat in one household, and an unknown number of animals at two sanctuaries for large felids,” an FDA official said in a statement.
Cases have been in California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington state, the FDA said.
Investigators are now working to trace back the outbreaks, the official said. Testing is underway but could take several weeks to yield results to pin down the source.
It is unclear how the virus spread into pet food. Taxpayers have funded record numbers of poultry being culled in an effort to stem bird flu outbreaks, and U.S. officials said this month that farmers are not allowed to use meat from those birds in pet food.
“Affected flocks that are depopulated as part of USDA’s efforts to control H5N1 are not permitted in any food product at all. They are most frequently composted on site, as part of the efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus,” Eric Deeble, Deputy Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, told reporters last week.
While bird flu has largely spared many of the humans and cows sickened by this past year’s outbreaks in the U.S. from death or severe disease, officials have warned that the virus is especially lethal to cats.
In response, the FDA said Friday it would order manufacturers of uncooked cat and dog foods to take steps to curb further spread.
Potential risks of raw pet food
Raw and minimally processed pet foods make up a minority of U.S. pet food sales, but the consulting firm OC&C said last year that there’s been “rapid growth” in the market.
The American Animal Hospital Association says it does not endorse feeding pets raw protein food. The group warns that “overwhelming scientific evidence” shows it puts animals and the humans around them at risk of disease.
To comply with the new requirements, producers either need to start cooking their products or come up with another way to cut the risk in their food safety plans.
“As we learn more about the transmission of H5N1 in animal food, there are several practices that the FDA is encouraging pet food manufacturers and others in the supply chain to use to significantly minimize or prevent H5N1 transmission through animal food,” the agency said.
The move also prompted the federal Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to step up oversight of turkey slaughter, after a bird flu strain detected in raw pet food and an infected cat was linked to a turkey flock.
Under the program, APHIS said it would require turkeys to undergo isolation and extra testing in some states before they could be slaughtered.
Health officials in California last year had warned against feeding pets recalled raw milk and a local raw pet food brand, Monarch Raw Pet Food, after a probe of cat deaths. Monarch has disputed the allegation, saying there is “no credible evidence” that their products were to blame.
Oregon’s agriculture department also warned of an outbreak last year also linked to raw turkey pet food by Northwest Naturals, which had been sold in a dozen states and Canada. Officials in Oregon confirmed to CBS News this month that the FDA had taken over the investigation.
Bird flu outbreaks in poultry and dairy herds
U.S. officials and farmers have braced in recent winters for an uptick in outbreaks, as migrating wild birds that spread the virus fly south from Canada.
This winter’s migration started around a month later than usual, U.S. officials say, delaying when the surge of bird flu began to hit farmers hard.
“Apparently it was a very seasonally warm fall and early winter further north, and so that kept a lot of those birds up co-mingling with each other further north, before they started the fall migration,” said Alex Turner, the USDA’s national incident coordinator for the outbreak.
Turner said they expect that could lead to the surge in bird flu subsiding a month later, as the amount of virus lingering in the environment from their migration starts to wind down.
“Now that they are predominantly kind of where they’re going to be for the winter, there’s a little bit less of that migratory movement and exposure,” said Turner.
This is on top of ongoing outbreaks from a different strain that spilled over into dairy herds in 2023. That virus has spread back from cows to birds at nearby poultry farms in some cases.
That may be what happened in Northwest Naturals. Oregon’s agriculture department said the strain in the turkey product was B3.13, the same as the bird flu virus fueling the dairy outbreaks.
