• Question: Have you ever dissected an animal that has been infected.

    Asked by anon-230934 to Tom, Steven, Jessica, Haafizah, Clio, Bruno Silvester on 19 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Bruno Silvester Lopes

      Bruno Silvester Lopes answered on 19 Nov 2019:

      No…it is always a risk (of infection) depending on what you are dissecting…I have seen a dissected animal by my teacher when I was in school but never dissected one.

    • Photo: Steven Rudder

      Steven Rudder answered on 19 Nov 2019:

      I have never dissected an infected animal. At university I dissected a fish.

    • Photo: Clio Andreae

      Clio Andreae answered on 20 Nov 2019:

      I have dissected a fish at Uni and have infect wax moth larva before. I haven’t done any animal work but drug discovery medial research will use animals to determine how the drug works and how many bacteria are in certain organs (bacterial burden). The infection risk to those working with animals is present but safety measures are in place to make sure infection does not occur.

    • Photo: Jessica Mitchell

      Jessica Mitchell answered on 21 Nov 2019:

      Yes, when we had a TB problem in our meerkats we would do post-mortem (after death) examinations of the body to look for TB lesions (cuts) inside the body. It was important to record if these were present and roughly how many (although in very badly infected animals there would be too many to count). We also took blood and tissue samples for lab analysis. This was only done by trained staff who were very careful and wore protective masks to make sure we stayed safe.

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