Eight Asiatic lions at NZP recover
Animal-keeper had complained of fever and mild Covid symptoms
Eight Asiatic lions from Nehru Zoological Park have dodged the Covid-19 bullet. After they tested positive for Covid1-9, the lions have been isolated for a period and recovered following medication.
Officials say an animalkeeper complained of fever and mild Covid symptoms but tested negative twice. This could well be a case of asymptomatic infection that passed on to the animals, zoo officials said, adding all other animals in the zoo are healthy.
The eight lions at the city zoo were the first wild animals in India, captive or wild, to have been tested
Covid-19 positive after transmission of the virus to them from humans. “The health of the animal-keepers attending to these lions is being monitored. Though there are no known cases of humans catching Covid from animals in the country, we have to be careful. We do not know if the virus changes once it enters animals,” a senior zoo official said.
CCMB, meanwhile, has said the genome sequencing of virus samples from the lions showed that they were infected by the earlier strains that spread through the country last year and did not belong to any mutated versions of the virus.
It was during the third week of April that animalkeepers
in charge of the Lion Safari Park in the zoo began noticing that the lions were wheezing. There was discharge from their noses and mouths. Since collecting samples from lions was next to impossible, the zoo’s veterinary team collected the nasal and oral discharges deposited on the floors of the nigh houses of the lions (small cages where the animals are kept during the night). These were sent for testing on April 24 to the Laboratory for Conservation of Endangered Species at CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (LaCONES-CCMB). The samples were tested using RT-PCR, and were found positive for Covid-19.
The zoo veterinarians, meanwhile, began treating the lions for Covid-19 and said all the eight lions were now in good health.
Since collecting oral and nasal samples from wild animals is not possible, scientists from LaCONESCCMB have begun work on developing a new protocol for identifying Covid-19 infections among wild animals using fecal samples.
On Tuesday, they collected fecal samples from the eight infected lions to study how Covid-19 infections can be identified from such samples. “We have to develop non-invasive ways to procure samples from animals. Getting swab samples from animals is very difficult,” said Dr Karthikeyan Vasudevan, scientist-incharge, LaCONES-CCMB.