Animal shelter personnel face occupational health risks that workers in most other professions don’t have to worry about. They’re called zoonotic diseases, and they’re a very real threat to your health.

Diseases in the shelter, she thought, were an animal thing. Runny noses, sneezing, fever, diarrhea...those were things animals gave to each other, not to people. No one at the shelter thought to protect themselves from sick or injured animals. So when Julie Morris started feeling sick, she assumed it was just a nasty flu. She had diarrhea, cramps, nausea, and fever, but didn’t think to seek treatment until she was so weak she couldn’t climb the stairs to her apartment. What she had was giardiasis, and she had most likely contracted it from a sick animal at her shelter.

Morris, now fully recovered from that illness of long ago and working at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said that at the time no one wore gloves or washed their hands as often as they should have. Like many shelter workers, she found out too late that disease-control measures were important not just for the health of the animals, but for the health of the people caring for them.

 Read the full feature.

Julie Miller Dowling researched and wrote this feature section. Geoffrey L. Handy and Cynthia Stitely contributed. Frederick Angulo, DVM, Ph.D., of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Monika Walters, M.D., served as reviewers.