Study will look at how pathogens spread from animals to vets

Researchers at UCLA are studying how veterinarians and other animal health care workers might be at risk for contracting COVID-19 and other pathogens that can be spread from animals to humans, the university said.

Scientists at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health are conducting the COVID-19 epidemiology study to understand occupational exposure to the virus, said team leader Anne Rimoin, a professor and director of the UCLA Center for Global and Immigrant Health.

“Zoonoses are infectious diseases that spread from animals to humans,” Rimoin said in the announcement. “They are very common, both in the United States and around the world. It is estimated that six out of every 10 known infectious pathogens in humans are zoonotic in origin, and three out of four emerging infectious diseases come from animals.”

Rimoin is also leading a similar study of health care workers and first responders in Los Angeles County.

COVID-19 in animals needs further research, scientist says

According to one Utrecht University professor, the spread of the new coronavirus in animals needs to be studied further.

If the virus can reproduce and survive independently in other species, it could potentially jump across to humans again later, Arjan Stegeman wrote recently in The Conversation.

COVID-19 cases in cats and dogs appear to have come from humans. But the way the virus spreads within animal populations—for example, whether infected cats can spread it to cats in other households, creating virus reservoirs—requires further investigation, Stegeman said. As demonstrated by mink farms in the Netherlands, animal-to-human reservoirs may be possible and also need to be examined, he wrote.