Researchers who tested blood from 73 domestic cats living near California dairy farms found antibodies to H5N1 bird flu in three of them, and two of those three were indoor-only cats. No indoor cat in the survey was fed raw meat or dairy. The finding appears in the September issue of the CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases and was released online in late July.
The distance pattern is the part that matters. All three antibody-positive cats lived within about 2 kilometers, roughly 1.2 miles, of a dairy farm. None of the 61 cats sampled farther away tested positive.
