What do MDs know about zoonoses?

What do MDs know about zoonoses? Research indicates that human physicians are unaware of and uncomfortable discussing zoonotic diseases. But veterinarians can help fill the knowledge gap.If you visited your doctor and asked her to fill you in on zoonotic disease risks, how much do you think she’d be able to tell you, and how comfortable do you think she’d feel talking about it? Most likely not very comfortable at all, says Audrey Ruple, DVM, MS, PhD, DACVPM, MRCVS, assistant professor of epidemiology at Purdue University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and speaker at a recent Fetch dvm360 veterinary conference. When it comes down to it, zoonosis is the purview of veterinarians, Dr. Ruple says. First, let’s look at what the average human patient knows about zoonosis, according to research compiled by Dr. Ruple. In a survey conducted in 2009, only 54% of respondents said they knew they could get intestinal helminths from dogs.1 People just don’t know what they don’t know. Here are some more findings: 98% of respondents had heard of rabies (that’s good!), but only 58% knew that rabies exposure could be deadly (that’s bad). 83% of respondents would go to the ER if exposed to rabies, and 89% of respondents knew you could get rabies from bats. But wait. It gets better. When asked where they got their information about zoonotic disease: 49% of respondents thought TV, newspaper or the internet was the most important source of information about zoonotic diseases. 35% of respondents thought veterinarians were the most important source of information about zoonotic disease. Only 6% of respondents thought doctors were the most important source of information about zoonotic disease.