When physicians and veterinarians team up, all species benefit

Dromedary camels can carry the MERS coronavirus, which can infect humans. Here, veterinarians take a sample of fluid from the animal’s windpipe. They are trying to better understand how the virus is transmitted from camels to humans. A chimpanzee named Pandora changed the way physician Barbarita Natterson Horowitz thought about practicing medicine

. Veterinarians at the Los Angeles Zoo, in California, were worried Pandora had a heart problem. The zoo did not have the medical tools it needed to study the chimpanzee’s heart. But a human hospital would. So the zoo doctors called Horowitz, a cardiologist and professor of medicine. She works at the University of California, Los Angeles, not far from the zoo. She takes care of people with heart problems.

One way Horowitz checks people’s hearts is with a special type of ultrasound . First, a patient must be under anesthesia. Then Horowitz slips a small probe down their throat toward the stomach. Once level with the heart, the probe bounces sound waves off the heart to create images. To her trained eyes, those images show details such as the thickness of the muscle, blood flow and how hard the heart is pumping. Zoo vets are highly trained […]

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