Cloaca vs anus

Functional results for the bowel, the genital tract, and the urinary tract were formerly poor. Cloacal exstrophy, which is an even more complex spectrum of malformations, was uniformly fatal until In addition to imperforate anus, these babies have an omphalocele, two exstrophic bladders, between which there is an open cecum, and a blindly ending colon hanging down in the pelvis from the cecum. Although both of these diagnoses contain the word "cloaca," which is Latin for sewer, they are really two separate entities in terms of surgical management.

In rare cases 1 in every 50, babies , this process does not work properly and these tracts do not separate from one another completely. However, everything else looks normal. While the tracts drain from the body via a common channel, the channel is usually short, allowing waste to leave freely and not infect any other tissue. For this reason, getting waste to leave the body is more difficult. Urinary tract infections are common in these types of infants. Patients with cloacal malformations may have other problems as well, including having a clitoris that looks like a penis. The vagina may be blocked, the anus may have an odd shape, and there may be more than one vagina and cervix.

The key difference between anus and cloaca is that the anus is the opening of mammals that they use to excrete waste material from the digestive system while the cloaca is the opening of birds, reptiles and fish that they use to excrete both urine and waste material. Not many people are aware of the fact that reptiles, birds and fish have a single opening for excretion of waste material as well as urine. However, this is in sharp contrast to mammals including human beings that have separate openings for excretion of urine and waste material.

All amphibians , reptiles , and a few mammals monotremes , tenrecs , golden moles , and marsupial moles have this orifice, from which they excrete both urine and feces ; this is in contrast to most placental mammals, which have two or three separate orifices for evacuation. Excretory openings with analogous purpose in some invertebrates are also sometimes referred to as cloacae. Mating by cloaca is known as cloacal copulation , mostly referred to as cloacal kiss. The cloacal region is also often associated with a secretory organ, the cloacal gland, which has been implicated in the scent-marking behavior of some reptiles, [1] marsupials, [2] amphibians, and monotremes. The word is from the Latin verb cluo , "to cleanse", thus the noun cloaca , " sewer , drain".