Health and disease

Marsupials and monotremes are susceptible to a range of infectious and non-infectious diseases. Some of these diseases are also found in eutherian mammals but the manifestation is different. Other diseases are unique to particular marsupial species. Monotremes may be more susceptible than eutherian mammals to infectious agents that survive best at lower temperatures, such as the fungus Mucor amphiborum that infects the platypus, because of their lower body temperature. Chlamydiosis is thought to play a role in the decline of koalapopulations. Infected animals may suffer from ocular, urinary tract or reproductivetract diseases. Devil facial tumour disease is an infectious cancer that is driving the Tasmanian devilpopulation towards extinction. These two latter diseases are of particular importance to wild populations of those species. Many macropodspecies are susceptible to stressor capture myopathy. The condition is of primary importance in captive macropods. A range of other diseases of parasitic, viral, bacterial, fungal, neoplastic and nutritional origin are also described with a focus on those conditions that differ between marsupials and eutherian mammals, are of direct importance to marsupial populations or where marsupials play an important role in the transmission to humans or domestic livestock.