It’s such a cute word, isn’t it? Zoonoses. It looks like it means the velvety sniffy part of a lion, or the wet and friendly snuffly part of a horse looking for carrots or sugar.

Alas, no. It’s a cuddly word for a horrific concept: the infectious diseases that can pass between animals and humans. Rabies. Tularemia. COVID-19. They can be bacterial, viral, or parasitic. These diseases are survivalists: they can transmit in all kinds of ways—direct contact, food, water, air.

If it helps, the word is not pronounced “Zoo Noses,” it’s pronounced “zoh-wanna-sees,” which reduces the adorableness by a huge margin in my book. Part of the scariness of these diseases is that the risk factor for them can be pretty high even if you’re just walking around living your everyday life. You don’t have to get divebombed by a confused bat or attacked by a flock of mean and angry geese. All you have to do is pet a dog, or eat something prepared by someone who cleaned their cat’s litterbox and failed to wash their hands vigorously enough.

However, like so many things, zoonoses are not necessarily indicative of End Times. Ringworm, scabies—they’re gross, but they’re not fatal. You might not even know if you get toxoplasmosis from that cat litter person if your symptoms are mild (and they often are).

Her’s another no-duh observation: The big risk with zoonoses is when new ones pop up. The close relations between humans and animals means that they spread fast and mutate often, and it’s hard to fight a fast-moving enemy when you don’t know anything about it—including whether it’s going to kill you at all, slowly, or otherwise. Add in the time it takes experts to figure out there’s a problem that needs addressing (think Ebola), and you get epidemics.

On the plus side, it might take too long, but antidotes usually are found eventually. Rabies is highly treatable, unless you’re Old Yeller. AIDS is no longer a death sentence. Lyme disease used to be a big deal; when my kid got it in the mid-2000s, the doctor got all excited, took a photo of “the biggest bullseye I’ve ever seen!” and flagged down a bunch of her colleagues to “hey, come get a load of this!” (Trust me, this is a pretty effective way to make you feel like the World’s Worst Parent.) Then she wrote a prescription for amoxicillin and sent us home to have big mother-son battles about taking pills without barfing them up or hiding them in the sofa cushions.

So, yeah. Pet your cat’s adorable nose. Then go wash your paws.