SOME DISEASES TRANSMISSIBLE FROM MONKEYS TO MAN
Are there any diseases my family or I can catch from
my pet monkey?
k
ey
disease human monkey
Ron Hines, DVM PhD 4/29/06
Please read bottom footnote first**
I guess I am a bit reactive about Old World monkey diseases because I have been asymptomatic, but TB positive, since 1974. Recently, one of the wanting-a-monkey Yahoo club members suggested I might only be allergic to the test antigen. It began when I autopsied a group of rhesus monkeys that had just died at John's Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore. I had been told that they "couldn't possibly have TB because they had just tested TB skin test negative".
A few years before - I was in the process of moving to Uganda to work with African Green Monkeys when several of my colleagues in Marburg, Germany died suddenly after being exposed to African Green monkey blood. This was later named the Marburg Agent virus. At the same time I was responsible for NIH rhesus monkeys arriving from Bangla Desh. We had no test to distinguish between human-fatal Herpes B antibody and Herpes simplex (Human Cold sores) - so that kept us tense.
At that time too, most of us primate workers developed shigellosis. Sometimes it killed the primates, but it would just turn our intestines inside out and make us wish we were dead. We all recovered. About that time too, I worked with the National Institute on Infectious Disease on a project with prions. They could not be killed by sterilization with heat or radiation, and would grow in Chimps and slowly cause dementia. When it occurred in the Fore tribe in New Guinea, it was called Kuru - the laughing death - it is akin to mad cow disease.
Then there were all the orphan virus we grew in my monkey cell tissue cultures. They killed the tissue culture as well as human WI 38 tissue culture - but we never really knew what the diseases were that they caused, and none of us were curious enough to inject ourselves with them to find out.
These are just a few Old World monkey diseases that come to mind off the top of my head at the moment. There are a lot more, I don't have the time to think about them all at the moment – but they are considerable. Ebola and poliomyelitis are two of them, and others are continually being discovered. One theory of the emergence of human AIDS is that it was transferred from chimpanzees to man by biting insects and then mutated.
South America split off of Africa long enough ago that South and Central American monkeys don't seem to pose the same risk. The world's most knowledgeable monkey virus expert is Dr. Julia Hillary at Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research, San Antonio, Texas.
**Since answering this question for a potential purchaser of a pet monkey, I have been taken to task roundly by a host of pet monkey owners. Their points were valid. I dealt with newly imported, stressed animals which, in addition to carrying a host of primate diseases and parasites, had been exposed to village trappers in remote jungle locations who transmitted additional diseases to the poor animals. The basic point of many of these e-mails was that monkeys offered for sale by "reputable" breeders in the United States are now several generations away from the wild and that the likelihood of them having these diseases is decreased. There is no data on how reduced the number of these disease agents are - but their point is plausible.
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