I did a search, and none of the threads dealing with rabies appears to deal directly with my question, so I am making a thread. An opossum broke into our basement today, and was encountered eating from one of the downstairs cat food dishes. (Luckily the cats were all upstairs in the closed room with me at the time!) After we have managed to evict the opossum and block its entrance, we will unsequester the cats.
The opossum does not appear to be ill/rabid, but I am not taking chances. My question is, will boiling water sterize the food dish, or should it be thrown out and new dishes purchased? (I am heavily leaning towards just buying new dishes FTR, but my husband seems to think his microbiologist relative who passed away said that boiling water was enough. Is he correct?) How about the floors? I am going to inquire with the vet if they think we should get the cats rabies boosters or not. (If such exist for animals?) Can anyone provide me with information as to how best to make sure things are sterile?
So you can wash the dish out with detergent and a little bleach, if you like. Much easier than boiling water, I think. There shouldn’t be a thing to worry about.
What about other things the critter might be a carrier of? Do you think bleach would kill them too? Thank you for your reply so far, it’s eased my mind. I hadn’t thought of the old fashioned mop bucket of bleach water as a remedy, though from time to time I will use it to mop the kitchen and bathroom.
Bleach is a really good agent for neutralizing most of the pathogens around. We use a dilute bleach solution (hypochlorite, if you want to sound scientific about it) to clean up in the hospital lab where we play with blood and other fun body fluids. The things bleach can’t kill are microorganisms like TB bacteria and some types of spore-forming bacteria, but I don’t think those would be much of a risk in your case.
It’s not a bad idea to get your kitties up-to-date on their rabies shots, if they aren’t already. Just in case Mr. Opossum or his friends come back to visit while the cats aren’t locked away upstairs.
Boiling water will kill pretty much anything. If you were at particularly high altitude, boiling water might be cool enough that a few extremophile archaebacteria (like those found in Yellowstone hotsprings) might survive. But I don’t think that there are any extremophile pathogens, and you’re in Kansas. So, yeah, boiling water will certainly do the trick, for anything. I’ll let those better qualified comment on whether lesser measures would be enough.