Welcome to Public Health On Call, a new podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Our focus is the novel coronavirus.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, and also a former secretary of Maryland's health department.

Our goal with this podcast is to bring evidence and experts to help you understand today's

news about the novel coronavirus and what it means for tomorrow.

If you have questions, you can email them to public health question at jhh.edu.

That's public health question at jh.h. That's public health question at jh.h.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Megan Davis, a veterinarian and scientist of the Johns Hopkins

Bloomberg School of Public Health. This coronavirus is a zoonotic disease, which means it's

started in an animal, in this case a bat.

They talk about the rise of infectious diseases that emerge from animals and what is being done to prepare for future zoonotic diseases.

And they also discuss whether your pets are safe. Let's listen.

Today I'm here with Megan Davis, a veterinarian and scientist based

at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Thank you for joining me. I'm delighted to be

here. On this episode, we're going to talk about this coronavirus, which is what we call a zoonotic

disease. Could you first define what a zoonotic disease is? Absolutely. So a zonotic

disease is one that comes from animals and jumps into the human population and causes disease.

So we think about things like salmonella that you can get from a foodborne route as being

potentially a zonotic kind of transmission. What makes COVID-19 as a disease

and the SARS-CoV-2 virus zonotic is that when we look at the genetic code of the virus,

it looks a lot like coronaviruses that we see in bats.

And epidemiologically, we know that when we first saw this disease emerge in Wuhan, China,

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