Is your pet making you sick?
Who hasn’t looked their pet pooch or feline in the eyes and said, “You complete me.” Well... we come close! Our devotion to our pets is undeniable. But those adorable fur-balls couldn’t possibly make us sick, could they?
A new book published by the Ontario Veterinary College, Sick! Curious Tales of Pests and Parasites We Share with Animals, explores the transmission of disease from animals to humans. There is increasing concern over the proliferation of diseases like E. coli, West Nile, bird flu, swine flu, rabies, chronic wasting, mad cow, Lyme disease, etc. “We can’t solve these kinds of diseases by just looking at the people; we also have to look at the animals, the community and the environment, and how they interact,” said editor and contributor Dr. Elizabeth Stone. “They all interact more and more as we encroach on wildlife areas, and also as people are living more and more closely with their animals.”
A dean at the Ontario Veterinary College, Stone said the college has real strength in infectious diseases and public health. A lot of people have ventured from the college to do international work and development. Some fascinating stories emerged, and Sick is a collection of those far-flung tales.
For example, there’s a story about rabies in India and someone developing a program there. There’s one on tapeworms and epilepsy in Kenya and the transmission of tapeworms from pigs to people — in people it can migrate to the brain and cause epilepsy. Another story deals with tuberculosis in Ireland involving cows, the Irish badger and humans. The book discusses interventions as well.
Stone says it reveals how much veterinarians contribute to public health and how complicated these issues are. Veterinarians demonstrated humility, caring and an understanding of the complexity and cultural issues.
“People may be suspicious of health workers, both in our own community and abroad, whether it’s vaccines or people bringing their chickens in if they’re sick, and being concerned that maybe if they bring their chicken in it will be killed, but they need it for their livelihood.”
Some of the stories correspond to ones we’re hearing in the media. A medical illustrator shows how disease is transmitted. “I think people will find it a really interesting read. They’re short stories so people can just pick it up and read one or two and then come back to it,” said Stone.
Dr. Andrew Potter, director and CEO at VIDO-InterVac at the University of Saskatchewan, said vaccines continue to be the best way to attack infectious diseases. “We work on prevention of disease primarily and vaccines specifically, simply because, historically, vaccines have proven to be the single most effective way of preventing disease, whether it’s in animals or humans. And we’ve been using them for a long time, thousands of years, although only a few hundred in western culture. They’ve got a proven track record and they are sustainable as well.”
According to Potter, about 79 per cent of new diseases of humans are zoonotic (transmittable from animals to humans). “If you want to tackle the field of human health, and you don’t look at animals, you’re eliminating a huge part of the equation and a huge part of potential ways to take care of threats of disease in humans. We tend to look at both sides of the equation.”
He said new emerging infectious diseases, as well as old resurgent ones, have two things in common. “Virtually all of them come from animals — no big surprise. But the other thing is they require a high level of containment for us to be able to work on them. Most people in Canada and indeed most scientists in the world can’t really do a lot of work on them in the lab because they don’t have the facilities. We decided 10 years ago or more to build this high containment InterVac facility which allows us to actually work on a lot of these things, which has been just great since it opened last year, to allow us to rapidly do things.”
Much of the work at InterVac involves cattle, but this can cover a wide scope. They developed a vaccine for E. coli with collaborators at UBC. “A scientific paper came out last year that showed the use of that vaccine in cattle would reduce the incidence of disease by about 85 per cent. So it can have a phenomenal impact,” said Potter. The healthier the animals in our environment, the healthier our pets will be and, by extension, we ourselves.
Whether it’s just the neighbour walking his dog, humans and animals occupy the same space on the planet and are going to intermingle. “Microorganisms don’t carry passports, they cross borders pretty easily,” observed Potter. He doesn’t really worry about the ones we know about because everyone’s on the lookout for them. “I’m worried about the ones like SARS that nobody has a clue even exist.”
Stone and Potter agree that the risk of getting sick from your pet is pretty low. Some precautions can be taken, like taking your pets to the vet to make sure they’re healthy, getting them vaccinated and simply washing your hands.
“If somebody is immunocompromised — they’ve undergone chemo or something like that — you would want to be more cautious,” said Stone. Have somebody else change the cat’s litter box, keep your pets clean and walk them on a leash. Pregnant women should also take precautions.