Actually, here in Chicago we’ve had a horrible problem with mice, particularly this year. We always get a few, but we had probably a dozen this year. Now I’m kinda freaked.
There is a chance. Your bigger problem will be keeping your cat from becoming coyote food.
If there were mice in my apartment, plague or no plague, I’d be freaked. :eek: I don’t even like it when there are bugs in my apartment.
For an indoor cat? :eek: :eek:
If I got the Plague, I think I’d be a little Beechy, too.
I had Scarlet Fever once. If I hadn’t been so damned sick, I would have thought it was cool. But 18 hours on PenVK, and I was ready to go back to work. A lot of those old killer diseases are still with us. It’s just not all that hard to get cured.
Tris
Use Advantage or Frontline on them even if they don’t go outside. As people have said The Plague is treatable, I’d worry more about Hantavirus or that soil fungus whose name escapes me (Coccidiomycoides?)…
Or Killer Bees. I heard they’re finally here.
Well, there are all those celebrities.
Plague is pretty much a non-issue. What scares me more is hantavirus (and I’d have to spend a lot more time in the Four Corners area to even be at any risk.) In fact, I initially hard a hard time taking Camus’ The Plague seriously, though I’m well aware of the fact that that’s not the point of the novel.
Kalhoun, what part of New Mexico? That’ll change (slightly) the answers to your questions.
Actually, a lot of people get coccidioidomycosis, or Valley Fever. I’ve had it at some point, as my blood shows a titer to it, and I didn’t even know it. One doctor told me that if you’ve lived in Arizona for 10 years, you’ve probably had it. Sometimes there are no symptoms, a lot of times the symptoms are mild, like a lingering cough, and fairly rarely the fungus spreads to other systems and can cause a problem.
It’s pretty common for pets to get it, and it causes a lot more problems in them.
Darn you to heck!
muttersstealingmyjokemutters
I lived there for 5 years. It was the running joke and there were no a lot of cats… indoor or no.
But did you have to burn the velveteen rabbit of your childhood afterwards?! Enquiring minds want to know!!
We’ve been living with the plague for awhile now. There was an article about its effects on black-footed ferrets & ground hogs the other day in the NYT.
Likewise. A woman I know had it. Got it doing research on prairie dogs, I believe. She’s fine.
Modern antibiotics are a wonderful thing.
This hangs on my wall at work. In a pharmacy.
Just curious, where is Los Angles? Is it near Los Parabolas?
When the H2N2 virus mutates so that it can start passing person-to-person.
As long as it’s still bird-to-person and bird-to-bird, it’s not time to panic yet.
DON’T PANIC
may I interest you in this large fluffy towel?
When I lived in the Mississippi Valley (Memphis) it was truly incredible how many of the people I autopsied had histoplasmosis. Histoplasmosis is the Mississippi answer to coccidioidomycosis.
I had just come from NYC, so when I saw a Ghon complex (swollen pulmonary hilar lymph nodes with grossly recognizable granulomas, small subpleural focus) I freaked about TB. At first I was doing special stains on everyone, and the old docs were laughing at me. Then I started feeling like maybe the first diagnosis on the differential was histo, and the second was TB. After a while I learned to recognize the little fungal buggers at the edges of the necrosis iin the granuloma, and then I gave up thinking about TB. Never saw a case of TB the whole time I was in Memphis.
I particularly remember a ripe granulomatous mass in the hilum of a lung that had achieved clementine size. So big, that it was pushing up on the pulmonary veins and slightly distorting them. This man got a bullet through the hilum, and he bled to death internally. I always wondered if he bled faster because his goombah was pushing up on his hilar structures. It was a histoplasmoma. He was otherwise muscular and healthy, and probably had no idea he had a goombah next to his lung.
Everyone in Memphis has sinus problems. After a while I started getting them too. It was no great stretch of the imagination to wonder if I had got my histo infection, developed my quiescent Ghon complex, and was now hyperreacting to histo blown in whenever a storm stirred up the river dust. No proof of the hypothesis, but I secretly believe in it.
By the way - had to get to Virginia to get exposed to a real full-blown god-honest case of TB. Which came to us from Kentucky.
By the way, is it done to answer a thread three times in a row?
I can only post from home, and generally in the early AM or sometimes late PM hours. Am I overloading a thread when I answer like this? Please, somebdy correct my board etiquette.
I just wanted to say - I was finishing medical school when AIDS appeared on the horizon as a strange disease in gay men. Then we realized anyone could catch it, and it turned into plague. It was plague for a while. That is, the human race hauled out and re-manifested all the hoary responses to a plague. We get scared and nasty and, rarely, merciful and self-sacrificial, in the exact same Camusian way, every century or so. The only new thing is our current expectation that there won’t be plagues.
Just because Yersinia isn’t a dangerous plague any more doesn’t mean plagues have left us. The bacteria and the viruses are always evolving and who knows what or when the next will be. Can guarantee you human nature will be the same when the next one shows up. Ain’t pretty.
Hey, didn’t they do a Soprano’s episode about this?
oh dear… I just read this whole thread as plaque rather than plague… :smack: