The first FIP cure appeared a couple years before the pandemic, but for a long time cat owners’ could only buy black-market versions online. “It’s like bringing these cats back from the dead,” says Gary Whittaker, a virologist at Cornell who studies FIP. The two coronaviruses share enough similarities that COVID antivirals are also effective against FIP-in fact, they are downright miracle cures. It seemed like something about FIP must have changed, but what? Had a new strain appeared? Or, experts wondered, could the outbreak have something to do with the spread of COVID, also caused by a coronavirus and also known to infect cats?Įither way, the pandemic came with a silver lining for FIP: It made treating the cat disease a lot easier. The unusualness of this outbreak frightened cat owners on the island and confounded veterinarians around the world. In early 2023, lab-confirmed FIP cases in Cyprus shot up 20-fold. (It is related to but distinct from SARS-CoV-2.) The disease can fester in small, indoor outbreaks, but it had never raced across an entire island, leaving thousands of dead outdoor cats in its path. FIP is caused by a coronavirus that infects cats but not humans. Their bellies became swollen like bowling balls, a symptom characteristic of the disease feline infectious peritonitis, or FIP, that is almost 100 percent fatal left untreated. Stray and feral cats died by the thousands. So when a deadly cat outbreak began sweeping across the Mediterranean island this year, the humans quickly noticed something was terribly wrong. Produced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration.Ĭyprus is home to 1 million or so free-roaming cats that wander its streets, parks, and even luxury resorts.
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