• Question: Do animals get the same simple ilnesses that we do ?

    Asked by gmcg to Jen, Jill, Mel, Phil, Stef on 17 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Stefan Piatek

      Stefan Piatek answered on 17 Mar 2013:

      They sure do get a lot of the same types of illnesses that we do. Cats and dogs can get hepatitis, malaria, allergies, diabetes and urinary tract infections just to name a few. They usually are specific to that one species of animal so we don’t catch it from them or make them ill directly.

      Was there any particular type of infection you were interested in?

    • Photo: Phil Rice

      Phil Rice answered on 19 Mar 2013:

      They do, but they also pass infections onto us. For example measles probably originated in cattle when man started farming with animals and smallpox probably came from rodents, all this about 10,000 years ago. Cats can get a feline equivalent of HIV; some animal infections can be useful models of human virus infections for example wood chuck hepatitis as a model of human hepatitis B infection.
      From animal to man the infections are zoonoses,; the other way round they are called anthroponoses. Very good question.

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