Pueblog USa

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Talking Trash & Rodents

Zest for the ‘sauce’.

Just to make things more ‘interesting’, vis-a-vis trash, rodents and plagues (see previous item here), today’s Pueblo Chieftain carries an article about another rodent-borne plague. This one even more deadly than the good ole Black Death plague mentioned yesterday.

What bears emphasizing here is that hanta-virus is a virus and modern medicine doesn’t have much it can do to cure a viral infection. Antibiotics will deal with the bacillus bacteria that causes bubonic plague. But nothing in the arsenal of the AMA can cure hanta-virus. All they can do is treat the symptoms and hope the human body’s defense systems can overcome the infection before the infection overcomes the human body. With hanta-virus, it’s a better than one in three chance that the body will lose, according to reports I’ve seen. [Note: I chose the Washington state web-site on hanta because it gave a better description, especially of the deer mouse, than did the Colorado site.]

The rodents, particularly mice, are the principle natural resevoirs for the virus. Deer mice seem to be the first amongst these, as they don’t seem to be made sick by the virus. But all mice can carry it. And, as we all know, mice, like trash piles for the same reason rats do. So, keeping a nice big trash pile at one’s house allows for plenty of mice to live and build up a great stock-pile of hanta-infected droppings. Then, when people come by, once a year, to clean it out and haul it off to the annual clean-up effort, it’s like a biological warfare land mine, waiting for someone to ‘step’ on it.

That’s sort of what happened to that poor guy in the Alamosa Valley.

Therefore, again, I say that dealing with the trash problem in Pueblo is a higher priority than recycling.