Infectious Disease and Food Poisoning Investigations
The Food Team receives a variety of official notifications during the course of the year, primarily from General Practitioners. In the case of food poisoning, detailed investigations are carried out in an effort to establish the cause, and prevent the spread of the organism responsible to other individuals.
This can be absolutely vital when very low numbers of the organism are capable of causing infection and vulnerable sectors of the population such as the very young, the elderly or the infirm are at risk.
What is zoonosis?
Zoonosis (pronounced zoo-on-no-sis) is any infectious disease that may be transmitted from animals, wild or domestic, to humans.
The simplest definition of zoonosis is a disease that can be transmitted from animals to humans. A slightly more technical definition is a disease that normally exists in animals, but can infect humans. On other occasions it may be used to mean a disease that can complete its life cycle without a human host. None of these are wrong, although the first is overly simplistic.
Carriers of the disease
Animals that can carry zoonoses include:
- bats
- cats
- cattle
- chimpanzees
- dogs
- goats
- horses
- pigs
- primates
- rabbits and hares
- rodents
Common types of the disease
Some of the most important zoonoses are:
- anthrax
- brucellosis
- borna virus (infection)
- bubonic plague
- campylobacteriosis
- cutaneous larva migrans
- Oocular larval migrans
- ebola fever
- lassa fever
- leptospirosis
- listeriosis
- marburg virus infection
- MRSA
- ornithosis
- q-fever
- rabies
- salmonellosis
- SARS
- toxoplasmosis
- trichinosis
- typhus (and other rickettsial diseases)
- visceral larval migrans
- ringworm (Tinea canis, mainly)
Other zoonoses might be
- foot and mouth disease
(the human version Hand, foot and mouth disease is a different virus)
- BSE (mad cow disease)
bovine spongiform encephalopathy
- glanders
The influenza virus is an interesting example of these: it continually recombines genes between strains found in humans, swine, ducks, chickens and other fowl, producing new strains with changed characteristics, and occasionally, as in 1918, killing millions worldwide.
Today, zoonoses are of great concern because they tend to appear suddenly and be particularly virulent - the West Nile virus appeared in the United States in 1999 in the New York City area, and moved through the country in the summer of 2002, causing much distress. The plague was a zoonosis, as are salmonella, tetanus, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and Lyme disease.
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