Thread for talking about uncommon diseases from animals or the wilderness.
Examples: hantavirus, Rocky Mountain fever, plague, West Nile.
ocular toxoplasmosis
Cats are nasty
Hanta virus is quite fatal and usually healthy individuals. Always fear it while hiking, but never knew any one who has had it. Usually it is in the spring when people clean out their cabins. I saw a deer mouse in our house once (known to carry it) and it was the cutest mouse you ever saw- think Minnie Mouse. So sad.
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Deer mice are cute. They have this distinctive fluffy tail tip. I freaked out when kid sent me a pic of a mouse she caught in the Airbnb theyâre staying⊠told her not to sweep floors and get out as soon as they could.
Iâm surprised the authorities tested for this rare virus⊠wonder what tipped them off. What a sad sad case. And the poor dog.
I never heard of this illness before . I already am terrified of mice - this is frightening. 
How awful for them and this family. 
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I had to clean up our family cottage after mice got in over the winter (thankfully that has only happened once). I took serious precautions, including wearing a respirator. I threw away everything the feces had been near that couldnât be cleaned with Lysol. My MIL was upset at some of the things I threw out, but I wasnât going to put the poop-infested tablecloth that the mouse used for a nest in my washing machine. No one but me seemed to take it seriously ⊠this sad situation makes me feel a bit vindicated.
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The area they lived and she had the pulmonary type- I seem to remember a pulmonary abnormality on autopsy.
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Hantavirus is not uncommon in NM. D1 saw a case of it when she was med student at UNMâs med school. There are usually 1-2 cases/year in New Mexico. It takes 1-8 weeks from date of exposure for hantavirus symptoms to manifest.
When someone dies of pulmonary edema of unknown origin (which was the case in Arakawaâs death), hantavirus is one the things thatâs routinely tested for by the NM Office of the Medical Examiner.
Hackmanâs house is located higher up the piĆon forest of the Santa Fe Mountains. There are lots of wood rats (and other rodents) in the area. The piĆon nuts provide a plentiful food supply for them. Rodents also carry bubonic plagueâwhich again is not uncommon in NM.
They also had dogs. Dogs cannot become ill from hantavirus, but if they brought dead (or live) rodents into the house or âgiftedâ them to their owners, they could have brought the virus in with them.
And wood rats are very cute. One of my cats caught one, carried it proudly into the house and dropped it at my feet as a literal birthday present one year. Turned out it was still alive and it promptly scampered off into my laundry room. Took me 3 days to catch it then I had to treat its little rat corpse as a hazardous waste disposal situation. (Rubber gloves, N-95 mask, bleach. Rat corpse gets double bagged with bleach solution saturating the corpse in the inner bag. The city solid waste dept helpfully sends out instructional inserts on how to do this along with your monthly bill.)
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BTW, itâs a longstanding joke among med students from New Mexico that any question on the USMLEs that starts with, âThe patient, who has recently visited the Southwest,âŠâ has only 3 possible answers: bubonic plague, hantavirus or valley fever.
You donât even need to read the rest of the question.
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The cat did not catch the rat again after leaving it in the house?
Nope. He complete lost interest in it.
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Obviously not a re-gifter.
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Itâs a good joke!
But itâs also a real problem with medical curricula/testing when questions are written such that stereotyping takes the place of thinking. Because the vast majority of patients with cough and fever who recently traveled to the Southwest will NOT have plague, hanta or cocci.
When I was in medical school some of us noticed that in every case study with a gay man the correct answer was going to be AIDS, and when a case featured a Black patient with chest pain, the correct answer was going to be cocaine-induced arterial spasm. And so onâŠ
So we groused about it among ourselves. Until one of our classmates (a womenâs studies major out of a public college) thought hey I actually have the tools to tackle a problem like this. And she teamed up with another bright student, and the 2 of them sold the idea to a PhD faculty mentor, and scraped up funding, and organized a team of fellow students to comb through the thousands of pages of notes of every test and lecture given us during the entire 2 years of classroom education. And analyzed the stats, and wrote the paper, and submitted it, and got it published. And decades later itâs still getting cited.
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These were my biggest fear when my DS and DH did the Philmont Ranch Scout backpacking week. Oh⊠and the bears too.
Iâve been camping in the Philmont area many times. Not really the right type of terrain for valley fever. Bubonic plagueâonly he was picking up dead squirrels. Hantaâunless there were mouse droppings in the tent platforms (and Iâm sure the BSA checked those before the campers arrived), heâs good.
Bears. Well, there are bears. They live there. But if youâre sensible and hang all food, food wrappers/boxes/cans, cooking pans, scented personal products like chewing gum, toothpaste, deodorant, bar soap and any clothing that may have food or grease residue on them or use a bear canister, you should be fine.
You donât bother them they wonât bother you.
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Oh they did all that. Leave no trace and all that. It was years ago. But I still worried!
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Going way off topic but my husband went to Philmont decades ago as a bs. During their long hike (50 miles?), the boys were bummed that they hadnât seen any bears. So on their last night, the scoutmaster had them leave their dirty cooking pans out near their camp! And yes, they saw bears that night.
When I was a college student, I was required to attend an 8 week summer field camp. I was poor, so I and a few others went a week early with the camp director to prepare the cabins and dining hall. We cleaned the cabins as best we could. Even so, later that summer, I had a mouse run across my pillow right in front of my face one night, and another day, I came back from the field to find a clump of newborn baby mice on my sleeping bag. Another night, I kept hearing a fluttering sound near my head. I finally woke up my roommate and we discovered that there was a bat in the cabin! She was brave and caught it while it was resting on the cabin wall by putting a shoebox over it.
Your worries were valid! 
Seriously though, I donât know what the odds are for catching these diseases and being harmed by wildlife are, but Iâm sure that riding in a car, jumping on a trampoline, playing in a backyard (bees), playing sports, etc. have exponentially higher odds of being harmed.
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I am sorta ok with harmed. I am not ok with dying!
Well, dying was included in my âharmedâ category. I just wanted to use a euphemism!
Ok, Iâm done hijacking!
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Wait, wait, wait!
I have another rare disease to add to your worry list: Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.
A close of friend and college roommate of my husband died of RMSF he contracted while hiking in Wyoming (might have been Montana). Got a headache about 3 or 4 days into a hike. By the time he had hiked out and got to a hospital he was critically ill with meningitis. He died only 2 days later. He was 23 and had just finished the first year of his chemistry PhD.
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