Sasha Chapman explains:
The idea that there is a connection between our health and that of other animals is not new. Sir William Osler, one of Canada’s most admired physicians and a father of modern medicine, is also considered a father of veterinary pathology. He believed that his students, whether medical or veterinary, should study the anatomy and pathology of both human beings and animals. When Osler delivered the inaugural address at the Montreal Veterinary College in 1876, he titled it “The Relations of Animals to Man,” and told students it would not be long before “you find out that similarity in animal structure is accompanied by a community of disease and that the ‘ills which flesh is heir to’ are not wholly monopolized by the ‘lords of creation.’ ” Back then, in lecture halls at the Faculty of Comparative Medicine and Veterinary Science at McGill, veterinary students sat alongside medical students.
Today, such crossover training would be highly unusual.
Most doctors have little to do with animal medicine, unless they’re taking the family pet for a checkup. Likewise, vets rarely take more than a personal interest in human medicine. Each profession keeps to itself, and each tends to collect and analyze its own data separately, making it difficult to share information and identify cross-species health risks. And in the case of zoonotic diseases—those that move from animals to humans—there can be a tendency, between the professions, to develop an us-versus-them mindset. Vets are concerned with their own patients’ health, and doctors with theirs. We segregate these disciplines at our peril. Most of the emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases that have plagued humans in recent decades—including Lyme disease, H1N1, and Ebola—began in animal populations, and were first transmitted to human beings either directly or through our shared environment. Consequences can be devastating, as in the case of plague, which emerges periodically from animal reservoirs.
The Dish 