Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger. Many of us are feeling

helpless in the face of the current pandemic, but the good news is there are things we can do right now

to reduce our risk of falling seriously ill and dying from COVID-19 and preventing even greater

infectious disease threats in the future. Did you ever think you would be worried about petting your own

dog or cat? Here is our first story. Ideally, once you become infected, you would be safely

quarantined away from your family in a so-called fever clinic, a dedicated facility designed to

assess, test, treat, and triage patients so you wouldn't put the people you live with at risk.

Fever clinics were one of the strategies used to bring the outbreak in China under control by

preventing clusters of family infections. In lieu of such innovations, the best choices try to

recover at home isolated as much as possible from your housemates. Preferably you should avoid

contact with both people and pets and be cordoned off in a sick room with a separate bathroom if

possible. Can pets get the disease? In rare cases, dogs have been found infected with the new

coronavirus, but the virus replicates poorly in canines. They don't seem to get sick,

and they don't appear to pass the virus along to others. This is consistent with what we saw in

SARS, where a small number of pets test positive, but they didn't appear able to infect others.

The COVID-19 virus has been shown to reproduce efficiently in cats, however, who are then able to

experimentally transmit the virus to other cats in separate cages, presumably via respiratory

droplets, even though they made themselves not become sick. A survey of 102 cats in Wuhan province

after the outbreak found evidence of infection in 15 of them, presumed as with the pet dogs,

to be cases of human to animal transmission. In the United States, the first confirmed case of

animal infection was a sickened tiger at the bronch zoo, followed by a few pet cats.

There is no evidence to date that pets have been a source of infection of COVID-19 for humans,

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