Medical Definition of Zoonotic

Zoonotic: Pertaining to a zoonosis: a disease that can be transmitted from animals to people or, more specifically, a disease that normally exists in animals but that can infect humans. There are multitudes of zoonotic diseases.

Some examples include:

• anthrax
• ascariasis
• brucellosis
• plague
• echinococcosis
• Lassa fever
• listeriosis
• Lyme disease
• monkeypox
• psittacosis
• rabies
• salmonellosis
• trichinosis
• toxoplasmosis
• typhus and
• West Nile fever

Zoonoses may appear suddenly and be relatively virulent, as illustrated by HIV which ignited the AIDS epidemic and the coronavirus responsible for the outbreak of SARS.