# 1537
After yesterday's news of hundreds of goats dying in the bird flu affected zones of West Bengal, TomDMV has written to me his ruminations (sorry, I couldn't resist) on the subject.
TomDMV, well known in avian flu circles, is a veterinarian in Canada. He provides some deep background on goat (and other ruminant) diseases.
Tom has graciously permitted me to reprint his thoughts here.
Thanks Tom!
Hi Mike.
About those sick goats.
I treated goats although I did not treat large herds of goats in restricted space... and it sounds like the goats in Nepal are on family holdings and are not in large groups.
As far as pneumonia goes, I don't think goats are highly susceptible but everything is relative I guess.
I would classify cattle as most susceptible to respiratory infections and especially life-threatening pneumonias...pigs would be next...then sheep ...then horses...and then maybe goats.
You might want to compare this situation to that in the Middle East (Egypt I think) where shockingly (to me anyway), it was resported that camels (ruminants) died in large numbers from influenza (I don't think avian).
I had never studied or heard where ruminants were in any way susceptible to influenza...as far as I know this is a first.
Before 1918, no animals were susceptible or infected it seems... and it is now believed by most that the pigs got it from the humans during the pandemic rather than the other way around.
For the past forty years or so only...horses (simple stomached with a large caecum that digests like a rumen in cattle etc. have had H3N8...also probably first transmitted from humans to horses...which then recently jumped to dogs and is causing serious problems and as a result H3N8 represents an active fault line also posing a real future pandemic threat directly or through recombination etrc..
If H5N1 could get into wild ruminants as a reservoir (or any other wild animal - shoreline mammal for instance)...it would be absolutely impossible to eradicate...and a similar very dangerous situation currently is the Chronic Wasting Disease in wild ruminants spreading across North America...highly transmissible unlike Mad Cow - BSE.
So to get back to those goats for a moment. Being relatively isolated, the only way they could all die at the same time would be for them to have eaten chicken carcasses at more or less exactly the same time...this seems improbable to me...
...it couldn't be a local epidemic being spread from goat to goat because they are probably too far apart for them all to get it at exactly the same time.
Rather, this could be a clostridial type infection soil borne (like anthrax) related to wet conditions following dry conditions...but this is just a guess...and I would expect shock and sudden death rather than high temperatures and pneumonia. I don't know of an infectious pneumonia that exists and would work this way in isolated goat populations simultaneously either.
To sort it out, a veterinarian with a pathology lab would be able to identify influenza on postmortem tissue examinations in a few days to a week...
...and of course a little routine survelliance of all animals would seem to be in order at this late state of pandemic strain evolution...as there is an unidentified missing link.
