Public health experts and animal lovers are carefully monitoring the health of a dog who may have had close contact with Nina Pham, the nurse being treated for Ebola virus disease at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital.

So far, there are no indications that Bentley, Pham’s 1-year-old King Charles spaniel, has been infected with Ebola or become sick as a result. Bentley is now in the care of the Dallas Animal Services and Adoption Center and being quarantined at “an undisclosed location,” according to the DAS Facebook page.

Workers watching over Bentley have donned full-body protective suits to make sure they don’t catch the deadly virus from Pham’s pet, if indeed he is infected. But the risk that a person could catch Ebola from a dog is exceedingly low, experts say.

There has not been a single case of a dog or cat spreading the virus to people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In fact, the CDC adds, “there have been no reports of dogs or cats becoming sick with Ebola” — not even in Africa.

That’s not to say that pets aren’t vulnerable to infection — there is scientific evidence that they are. During an Ebola outbreak in the African nation of Gabon in 2001 and 2002, researchers tested the blood of 258 dogs from various parts of the country and detected Ebola antibodies in more than 25 percent of the animals from villages in the epidemic area. For the sake of comparison, they also tested 102 dogs in France and found similar antibodies in two of them, though they could have been false-positives, according to their report in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

How did the dogs in Gabon get the virus? Probably not through casual contact, the researchers wrote: “We observed that some dogs ate fresh remains of Ebola-virus-infected dead animals brought back to the villages, and that others licked vomit from Ebola virus-infected patients.”