Question: what is the 3 diseases

Marisol Collins answered on 16 Nov 2016:

Hi there! I wonder if your question is maybe asking about 3 important diseases out there? There are so many important diseases that affect people and animals, so one way to answer this might be to give you examples of the different types of important diseases that animals and humans can get!

For example, there are diseases that we describe as infectious, which are caused by an organism invading the body and making an animal ill, such as a virus like rabies, or a bacteria like Salmonella.

There are also non-infectious diseases, like diabetes and cancer, and as vets we use lots of tests to investigate if we think an animal has one of these, for example blood tests and biopsies to look at samples under the microscope.

There can be diseases that can be caused by damage to the DNA in genes, and with some of these, animals can inherit them from their parent animals. An example in dogs is hip dysplasia – a problem with the way the hip joints develop as an animal is growing, which can lead to bad lameness. We know this problem will happen in certain breeds of dog, such as German Shepherds, and an X-ray test has been developed that lets us measure the hips to see how badly a dog is affected when it is young. If the dog is unlucky and has the disease, we can advise the owner not to breed from it, and help to treat the dog so it doesn’t suffer pain with the problem.

I hope this gives you an idea of the types of important diseases out there!

Marisol 🙂