April 2007 | Back to Table of Contents
Editor's Note
Animal Planet
My youngest son always wanted pets. We had tropical fish, a snake, cats, and, finally, a hamster. One Sunday not too many weeks after our hamster was nestled comfortably in his cedar shavings, my son found him shivering and, more or less, inert in one corner of his cage. Even an internist could tell that this hamster did not look good. My son was distraught. Clearly, comfort care was not an option he was going to consider. So we took the hamster to a veterinary “urgent care” in St. Paul. The kindly vet took our blanketed hamster, laid him on the exam table, looked at my son’s tearful eyes, and said gently, “That is a very sick hamster. I’ll see what we can do for him. Why don’t you go home, and I’ll call you.” Shortly after we got back, we got the inevitable call.
After sharing my son’s first experience with the loss of a loved one, I mused about how much the veterinary world was like the medical world. They have urgent care centers for Sunday emergencies. They have to deal with a panoply of medical problems from sepsis in hamsters to leukemia in cats. And they have to have bedside manner to comfort and console loving family members. Animals and the professionals who treat them have a skein of interconnecting ties to medicine, and those ties are explored in this month’s Minnesota Medicine.
Animals live around us and with us. As pets, they provide companionship and another living being we can truly love. As beasts in the wild, they can show the beauty and grace of nature and the diversity of our world. As research subjects, they advance medical science. And as domesticated animals, they feed many of us. Humans could not live without other animals.
Yet all is not harmonious between man and beast. Pets can infect us, and we can infect them (see “Diseases Pets and People Share,” p. 43). Wild animals can infect us with disease, and as nature’s ecology changes, those diseases change.
Some would say that we need to strive for more harmony with our animal brethren. Animal rights proponents call for an end to what they see as cruelty to animals in research labs and abattoirs. Vegetarians suggest that meat-eaters should examine more closely what happens to their food as it evolves from hoof to hamburger. Even those of us who support animal research and enjoy our steak need to consider the consistency of our beliefs and listen to the debate.
In his recent book The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, D.T. Max explores diseases caused by prions, including fatal familial insomnia (FFI), the malady that gives the book its title. He describes medical science’s slow realization that these nonliving proteins cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and kuru in humans and scrapie in sheep and also that they can be inherited in FFI. One of the key revelations came when medical researchers studying kuru among New Guinea natives communicated with veterinarians working with scrapie in sheep and discovered that the two diseases shared a common infectious agent.
We live in one big world of animals. And in a sense, both physicians and veterinarians are animal doctors, tending to our flocks, whether they speak or bark, and ministering to our flock’s family, whether they are a grieving spouse or a tearful 10-year-old.
Charles R. Meyer, M.D., editor in chief
Dr. Meyer can be reached at
cmeyer1@fairview.org