Thanks Pauline. An interesting thought and I did find some reports of lemurs being infected with rabies, although nothing in wild lemurs as far as I could tell. I also found one publication suggesting transmission of Enterobacteria into wild lemurs living in fragmented areas.
Hi, so far there has not been any report of disease transmission from lemurs to humans. There are evidence of disease transmission from humans to lemurs though (Cryptosporidium for example) The crypto we report in this paper was subsequently determined to be C. hominis.
Lemurs can get rabies (as any mammal) but they are not likely to get in contact or survive the exposure with a rabid dog. the reports of rabies in lemurs were, as far as I know from experimental infection or in captive lemurs.
Article Survey of Giardia and Cryptosporidium in lemurs from the Ran...
We should have another paper out shortly that will give you a little more information on this question. From that same epidemiology study we have some preliminary evidence showing that lemurs in disturbed regions have a higher prevalence of enterobacteria. It should be out in AJP soon!
Thank you for the help everyone. If any of you discover any other examples, would be excited to hear about it and looking forward to seeing the enterobacteria evidence Deanna!
Thanks for the suggestion; I took a quick look with Google Books and found only plague references for rodents in Madagascar and no references for lemurs, but perhaps the relevant sections are not available for free online. We don't have a copy of the book here at the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, but we can request specific chapters and they can be scanned and sent to us; I was wondering if you could perhaps point me in the direction of the relevant chapters? Thanks again for taking the time to answer and all the best,