Diseases Your Pets Can Give You

3/09/11

The bad news is there are a surprising number of diseases your pets can give you (called zoonoses (zoh-oh-NO-seez)). The good news is that using regular monthly preventive medications and taking simple precautions will reduce the risks to negligible. As these problems are relatively uncommon they are difficult to diagnose.

The following is a list of the most common zoonoses that occur from dogs and cats: roundworms, hookworms, tapeworms, Lyme disease and toxoplasmosis. Others include leptospirosis, cryptosporidiosis, infectious hepatitis and more. Of these, only Lyme disease, toxoplasmosis, and cryptosporidiosis are not either commonly vaccinated for or covered by commonly recommended preventatives. Lyme disease is transmitted by deer ticks while toxoplasmosis and cryptosporidiosis are transmitted by contact with feces or soil contaminated with feces. Simply keeping your pets up to date with their vaccinations, using preventatives recommended by your veterinarian and thoroughly washing your hands before all meals and after contact with soil, uncooked meats, sand, or unwashed vegetables will reduce your risk of contracting any of these diseases greatly.

                 
Surprisingly, up to 12% of people in the United States test positive for roundworms indicating that they have, at least once, been infected. Children are most commonly affected as they typically don’t wash their hands often enough and play outside in areas where dogs, cats and wildlife will eliminate. The migrating larvae of roundworms can cause blindness (the most common cause of blindness in some parts of the world), lung damage, intestinal problems, nerve damage and even death. The migrating larvae of hookworms cause itchy, permanently scarring skin lesions called cutaneous larval migrans and can be transmitted by simple skin contact with the larvated hookworm eggs. Crytosproridia is a protozoan that causes intestinal problems that are very difficult to treat (both in humans and in pets) especially in immuno-compromised people like the very young or old, those undergoing chemotherapy or with AIDS.

                 
Other preventative measures include strictly keeping sand boxes covered when not in use, wearing shoes and gloves when gardening, promptly removing feces from your yard and litter boxes, using good insect repellants when in tick infested areas, properly cooking all meat products, keep pets either totally or mostly indoors, and leash walk dogs to prevent ingestion of feces. Your pets are well worth the risks, especially if you take these relatively simple preventative measures.