Helena Smith reports Cyprus to begin treating island’s sick cats with anti-Covid pills:
Veterinary services in Cyprus have received a first batch of anti-Covid pills, from a stockpile originally meant for humans, as efforts intensify to stop the spread of a virulent strain of feline coronavirus that has killed thousands of cats.
The island’s health ministry began discharging the treatment on 8 August – long celebrated as International Cat Day – in what is hoped will be the beginning of the end of the disease that has struck the Mediterranean country’s feline population.
“We have taken stock of 500 boxes of medication,” Christodoulos Pipis, the government’s veterinary services director, told the Guardian. “This is the first batch of 2,000 packages that will be made available. Each one contains 40 capsules so we are talking about a total of 80,000 [anti-Covid] pills.”
Distribution of the drugs follows an “alarming increase” in Cyprus of cases of feline infectious peritonitis (FIP) caused by feline coronavirus which, if left untreated, is almost always fatal.
Defined as the “FCoV-23 outbreak”, the virus was first noticed in January in Nicosia, the Cypriot capital. Within three to four months it had spread across “the whole island”, according to the Pancyprian Veterinary Association (PVA).