Some of the biggest public health crises of the last few years can be traced back to animals. HIV got its start as a virus in monkeys, and Ebola probably jumped to humans from other primates or fruit bats.
And there’s no point in guessing the animals from which we got bird flu and swine flu. But animal-borne diseases can start a lot closer to home. In fact, there are a number we can pick up from our dogs and cats.
Zoonotic Diseases
Most diseases that can jump from animals to humans, called zoonotic diseases, affect species to which we’re closely related, like monkeys. But even though humans are pretty distant relatives of cats and dogs, we can still catch diseases from them simply because of how much time we spend together.
“We have this much more intimate relationship with our companion animals than we do with wildlife and other things we might come across,” says William Sander, an assistant professor of preventive medicine and public health at the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “There’s just a more increased chance of that happening.” It’s like the thought experiment of giving a monkey a typewriter — with enough time, odds are that it’ll randomly plunk out Hamlet. Only instead of iambic pentameter, it’s a disease.
