380 - Vaccines for Pets and Zoos? An Update on Animals and COVID-19
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2021
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As a zoonotic disease, COVID-19 can infect animals. Some, like farmed mink, are more susceptible to disease while others, like white-tailed deer, may only be carriers. But there's always the chance that a new variant of COVID could impact more animals, potentially endangering wild and captive creatures. Veterinarian Dr. Meghan Davis returns to the podcast to talk with Stephanie Desmon about what we now know about the risks for our pet dogs and cats as well as protected species like wild gorillas, and why some zoos are using an experimental vaccine for their animals.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City. |
| 0:20.0 | Our goal is to bring |
| 0:21.7 | scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews |
| 0:27.1 | with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. |
| 0:32.8 | If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jhhhu.edu. |
| 0:40.4 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:46.3 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call. Today, Stephanie Desmond |
| 0:51.4 | discusses animals and COVID-19 with Johns Hopkins veterinarian Megan Davis. |
| 0:56.8 | They talk about what we've learned about which animals may be susceptible to COVID and which |
| 1:01.8 | zoo animals are getting an experimental vaccine. Let's listen. Megan Davis, thanks so much for coming |
| 1:07.8 | back to the program. Thanks, Stephanie. It's great to be here. So I was really excited when you agreed to join me because I'm looking to hear about where we are |
| 1:16.3 | at the moment with animals and COVID, you know, a year and a half into this pandemic. |
| 1:20.8 | Yeah, that's a great question. And a lot has happened in the last 18 months. So of course, |
| 1:26.0 | from the beginning, we had a pretty good idea that there was a |
| 1:29.6 | wild animal reservoir from which we had the spillover event that started this whole COVID-19 pandemic. |
| 1:36.8 | And what we've learned since is that it probably was bats that were the original source. We think |
| 1:43.8 | that there may or may not be an intermediate |
| 1:46.1 | host. That's where the whole pangolin thing came in. And that's not yet settled. And it's also |
| 1:51.2 | not yet settled if there was a single spillover event, for example, at the market in Wuhan, |
| 1:57.2 | or if actually there may have been several different spillover events. There's some emerging genetic evidence there. |
| 2:03.6 | But what we have recognized in the meantime in terms of the animals that are susceptible |
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