Zoonotic Infections News

In previous months, this column has addressed bacterial (eg, glanders, Q fever, bovine tuberculosis), viral (eg, Orf, avian influenza) and prion (bovine spongiform encephalopathy/Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) zoonotic diseases. This time we move into the metazoan domain.

Last month, the Welsh National Public Health Service published a warning titled, “Advice to pregnant women during the lambing season.” It underlined the risk of pregnant women becoming infected with pathogens that cause abortion in pregnant sheep.

In December 2008, the National Public Health Service for Wales published an 11-page “final report” titled, “The investigation of an outbreak of diarrheal illness in participants of the Builth Wells Mountain Bike Marathon, July 2008.”

I recently had a few suggestions to write a “Zoonotic Infections” column addressing diseases of humans that are transmissible to animals. When I subsequently discussed the appropriate terminology for such diseases with a peer veterinary epidemiologist, he said, “Reverse zoonosis is fine by me but only because the medics insist that all zoonoses go from animals to man.”

One of the unfading memories of mine from my student years – between 1957 and 1963 at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht State University, Netherlands – was a colored picture hanging on the wall of the old surgery theatre. The realistically hand-painted picture showed a skinny, debilitated horse with abscesses, nodules and ulcers covering the entire body, while mucopurulent discharge was streaming out of its nostrils. “Malleus” and “Kwade [Dutch for malignant] Droes” were the two titles inscribed beneath the picture, which most probably dated back to the 19th century. (The “Imperial veterinary school” in Utrecht was established in 1821.)

Ab Klink, the Dutch Minister of Health, was recently asked by Marianne Thieme, a member of the Dutch Parliament, to address the issue of “a mysterious neurological disease affecting slaughterhouse personnel.” This related to the U.S.-derived reports on progressive inflammatory neuropathy in pork plant workers, an emerging syndrome reported in 2007/2008 from Minnesota and Indiana.

Two recent wide-scale Salmonella food-poisonings and an unusual event in farm animals, reported from distant parts of the globe, will be briefly described in this column. Before doing so, a summarized review of Salmonellosis may be in place.

The current sequel of this series is addressing the control measures of avian influenza in animals.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza, previously known as fowl plague, is regarded as the most infectious and devastating disease of poultry. It was one of the very first animal diseases included in List A of the World Organization for Animal Health — namely diseases with potential for rapid interboundary spread and severe implications for international trade.

On Aug. 22, 1997, ProMED posted the following e-mail, received from John S. Tam, PhD, at the department of microbiology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong: