Your Pet can send you to the Hospital

These days, owning a pet for companionship or as status symbol is common place. Sometimes, too, in crime-infested neighborhoods, people own pets for security.

Indeed people and animals have a long history of living together and bonding. A few years ago, Israeli archaeologists dug up

what they said was a 12,000 year old human skeleton buried with its hand resting on a skeleton of a 6 month old wolf puppy. Such is the bonds between animals and humans.

The general belief is that there are health benefits to owning pets, both in terms of psychological well-being and development, as well as physical health benefits.

Happy times with pets

Experts in human animals’ interactions say studies suggest that four- legged friends can help to improve our cardiovascular health. A study looked at 421 adults who had suffered heart attacks.

 

A year later, the scientists found out that the dog owners were significantly more likely to still be alive than were those who do not own dogs, regardless of the severity of the heart attack.

Another study looked at 240 couples. Those who owned a pet were found to have lower heart rates and blood pressure, whether at rest or when undergoing a stressful test, than those without pets.

Again, therapists and researchers say children with autism are sometimes better able to interact with pets, and this may help in their interactions with people. Such is the greatness of owning pet!

 

Despite these awesome advantages, experts express concerns about the possible health fallout of owning a pet. Perhaps to underscore this, September 28 has been set aside as the World Rabies Day, and it aims to, among other things, raise awareness about the impact of rabies on humans and animals.

 

Apart from rabies, the list of disease that can be passed from animals to humans is astounding, and they range from skin conditions like ringworm to plagues, diarrhoea-causing bugs like Salmonella, Campylobacter and Clostridium difficile (a harmful bacterium that produces toxins that attack the lining of the intestine). Pet owners can also be infected with more exotic and Health-threatening ailments like leptospirosis (a rare and severe bacterial infection whose symptoms can take 2-26 days to develop, and may include dry cough, fever and headache); toxoplasmosis (a rare but serious blood infections) and monkey pox – an animal cousin of smallpox.

 

Animals can also infect their owners with yersinic pseudo tuberculosis (which causes appendicitis-like abdominal pain), cryptosporidiosis enteritis (an infection of the small intestine with the parasite cryptosporidium that causes diarrhoea, accompanied by abdominal cramping and nausea) and Mycobacterium avium complex (a group of bacteria that are related to tuberculosis and can severely affect those infected by HIV).