Pets as Sentinels, Forecasters and Promoters of Human Health

Part I: Pets as sentinels of human exposure to environ-mental contaminants.- Chapter1. Pets as sentinels of indoor contamination.- Chapter2. Sled Dogs as Sentinel Species for Monitoring Arctic Ecosystem Health.- Chapter3. Pets as Sentinels of human exposure to pesticides and co-exposure concerns with other contaminants/toxicants.- Chapter4. Role of pet dogs and cats as sentinels of human exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.- Chapter5. Pets as sentinels of human exposure to neurotoxic metals.- Chapter6. Biotransformation of brominated compounds by pet dogs and cats.- Chapter7. Using cats as sentinels for human indoor exposure to organic contaminants and potential effects on the thyroid hormone system.- Part II: Pets as forecasters and promoters of human health Chapter8. Obesity in human and dogs similarities, links and differences.- Chapter9. Canine and feline spontaneous mammary tumors as models of human breast cancer.- Chapter10. Pets and immunomodulation.- Chapter11. Pets as a Novel Microbiome-based Therapy.- Chapter12. Neurological perspectives on pets and the elderly: the truth about cats, dogs and grandparents.- Chapter13. Companion animals and human health: on the need for a comprehensive research agenda towards clinical implementation.- Part III: Psychosocial and psychophysiological effects of human-animal interactions.- Chapter14. Phonetic variation in cat-human communication.- Chapter15. A dog's perspective on animal assisted interventions.

Dr. M. Ramiro Pastorinho was born in Braga, northern Portugal, in 1970. He graduated in Biology from Coimbra University, Portugal in 1997. After several years teaching at high school, he started research conducive to his Doctorate thesis on the latitudinal calibration of standardized marine bioassays, which created the opportunity of working, besides Aveiro University, at the University of Iceland and the Institute of Aquaculture, University of Stirling, UK. His passion for bioassays granted him a post-Doctoral fellowship which took him to the radically different setting of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, USA and the Colorado School of Mines where he became a Research Scholar, with periods spent at Ehime University, Japan as an International Invited Researcher. Working in a mining-focused setting steered him towards human health and an invitation to become an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Beira Interior, Portugal. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Évora, in the (sunny) South of Portugal.

Dr. Ana Catarina Sousa was born in Covilhã, Central Portugal, in 1976. She obtained her PhD in Biology in September 2009 from the University of Aveiro in collaboration with Ehime University in Japan. Upon finishing her PhD, she moved to the USA to work as Research Assistant in the Colorado School of Mines, moving back to Portugal in 2010 to start her first postdoc on Human Exposure Pathways to Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals. Her second postdoc was developed at CICECO, University of Aveiro and focused on the use of ionic liquids in the context of environmental health. Between 2017 and 2018 she was a researcher at Centre National de la Reserche Scientifique - CNRS, in France. Before starting her current position as researcher at CICECO, University of Aveiro she was a lecturer of Environmental Toxicology at Hokkaido University, Japan. Ana Sousa's main research interests and experience include the evaluation of