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Asked by jessica141 to Jen, Jill, Mel, Phil, Stef on 12 Mar 2013.
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Stefan Piatek answered on 12 Mar 2013:
A wonderful question. With diseases we’re often worried about it going the other way around, for instance HIV is a normal infection in chimps. It is quite rare for an illness to change from a human to another animal (species jump), but it can happen.
The main problem with this is that neither the disease, or the animal/human as evolved to encounter each other. That usually means that if the illness is successful it might not be able to be controlled, might grow too much, or our bodies might make too strong a reaction to it. This can lead to a disease being deadly – this is why we are worried about bird flu and swine flu.
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Phil Rice answered on 12 Mar 2013:
Really good question. Influenza virus has certainly passed from man to pigs. But, as Stefan has written, normally its the other way round. For example, measles started off as an illness in cattle thousands of years ago. Interestingly, although we have not yet even fully controlled measles (even in countries like the UK) and measles still kills hundreds of thousands oif children in developing countries every year, we have managed to eradicate the great-great-great etc etc grandfather of measles – Rinderpest virus. Makes you wonder whether livestock are more important than human beings! Maybe they are…
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Melissa Brereton answered on 13 Mar 2013:
As the other guys have mentioned below, we worry more about diseases that transfer from animals to humans- this is called zoonoses. Because humans are very close in evolution to monkeys, many human diseases can pass to them such as the common cold, measles, polio, tetanus, tuberculosis.
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