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Bestiality & STDs

evilsprout

Gone But Not Forgotten
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Stupid question, but can a human pass HIV to a goat?
 
There are animal strains of HIV but not nearly as bad as the human variant I believe. And since the human variant is made for humans, the goat should be pretty safe in that respect.

You wouldn't believe what the video stores here in Amsterdam have on the top shelves.
 
I wouldn't believe and don't want to know! However, those lovely little coffee bars with funny smelling cigs:)
 
It seems like I remember hearing that the AIDS virus actually physically originated in other animals than humans, where the the virus isn't as harmful.

Now, I don't know if that is true, but if so, how many of our other STD's originate in other species? And is bestiality the only way humans could have caught those viruses, or could they have been gottne through eating various animals?
 
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One theory goes that AIDS originated as a disease of primates and was originally passed to humans through physical contact as some African peoples have always hunted and eaten chimps.

Physical contact needn't mean sexual though, whether between chimps or between chimps and people. A disease takes the easiest transmission route and humans may have caught the original infections from being bitten by infected chimps or handling infected meat.

If an infection crosses from animals to humans- as with the 'chicken flu' epidemic in Hong Kong a few years ago- it can be controlled by destroying the pool of infection, ie by culling all the infectable animals. As humans can't catch it from humans the culling solves the problem.

If an infection crosses from animals to people and then from one person to another then the disease is much harder to control. Anthrax is like this: people can catch it from tending infected livestock and pass it to other people. That is why it is so feared.

Diseases pass from animals to people regularly and some are beneficial. Remember Dr Jenner and the milkmaids? He listened to folk knowledge about milkmaids, who were traditionally immune to smallpox because they always caught a similar but mild disease, cowpox, from their close contact with cattle. He tried infecting people with first cowpox then smallpox. None caught smallpox. That's why we call this treatment 'vaccination'- it means 'cow treatment'!
 
In a similar vein, as asked for: Syphillis is believed to have been endemic in North American bears as recently as 10 000 years ago. (They have remains of now extinct species of bears that make Grizzlies look like overgrown teddy bears with syphillitic damage to the bone.)

Leaving aside the question of: "With whom does a 15 foot tall bear sleep?" (Anyone it wants to.); the disease is not thought to have been sexually transmitted at that point. It may have been transmitted by ingestion, or other contact with infected bears. (Bears with late stage syphillis would preumably be fairly easy game.)

Well, it's either that or Columbus' men had been at sea way too long.

Another interesting STD/animal fact is that Chlamydia (bet I've spelt that wrong) is endemic in the koala population. It is actually sexually transmitted amongst the koalas, and I'm not sure how or if it spread to them from humans, or vice versa, or if it's just a coincidence.

A final note on such things: Just because a disease is sexually transmitted, doesn't mean it is the only way for it to be transmitted. It just usually means that transmission is caused by an exchange of fluid of whatever kind.
 
Warning of hidden risk of disease from pets

Horses, cows, pigs, and, perhaps less worrying for Britons, koalas are among other carriers of bacteria that pose an unknown risk to humans, say scientists at the Moredun Research Institute near Edinburgh.

Our proximity to pets, livestock, and wildlife could infect us with related species, David Longbottom and Lesley Coulter warn in the Journal of Comparative Pathology. Two animal forms of chlamydia are known to spread to humans.

Scary.
 
escargot said:
Remember Dr Jenner and the milkmaids? He listened to folk knowledge about milkmaids, who were traditionally immune to smallpox because they always caught a similar but mild disease, cowpox, from their close contact with cattle. He tried infecting people with first cowpox then smallpox. None caught smallpox. That's why we call this treatment 'vaccination'- it means 'cow treatment'!

Myth. Didn't happen that way.

What actually occurred was that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689 - 1762), wife of the British Ambassador to Constantinople, encountered the widespread use of smallpox innoculations (actually cowpox used to protect against smallpox) in Turkey, the practice having spread there from China sometime after 1572 (probably after 1643, when Yu Ch'ang published his Miscellaneous Ideas in Medicine). Lady Mary -herself a smallpox victim: she had been a renowned beauty in her youth until smallpox had left her badly scarred- demanded that her family were 'variolated' in 1718, at which time there was a smallpox epidemic in London. The treatment was so successful that by 1721, 'engrafting' -as it became called- was becoming widely practiced throughout Europe. The earliest accounts of the practice in the European medical literature are an account in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1714, by one E. Timoni, and another account in the same journal in 1716 by one J. Pilarini.

In China, the technique first appears around the year 980, when Prime Minister Wang Tan summoned doctors, shamans, wise men and women and alchemists from all over China: his eldest son had just died of smallpox and he wanted to protect the rest of his family from a similar fate. An unnamed Daoist monk or nun from Szhechuan (a three-white adept of the school of the ancient immortals) provided the first recorded use of innoculation against the disease. The practice was apparently never widespread in China despite being alluded to regularly in medical works until around 1567, when the practice finally took off in a big way.

Source: The Genius of China by Robert Temple, Prion Books 1991 (1998 ed.), ISBN 1-85375-292-4. This book is a distillation of Dr. Joseph Needham, FRS, FBA's Science and Civilization in China, Vols. 3, 4, 5 and 6.
 
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