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Dangerous Rat-Borne Disease Outbreaks Infecting Both Coasts

Dangerous Rat-Borne Disease Outbreaks Infecting Both Coasts

Boston public health officials warn about leptospirosis in homeless as West Los Angeles faces epidemic in dogs.

https://youtu.be/KF7hWzqdPDk

I have previously reported on typhus outbreaks associated with the ever-expanding homeless encampments in California, which are associated with rat infestations that feed off the garbage and shelter in the debris.

Now public health officials are issuing warnings about another rat-borne disease that is associated with homeless camps. However, this time it is on the East Coast.

The Boston Public Health Commission is warning of a dangerous rat-borne disease that puts the homeless at “high risk” as the rodent population and encampments boom side by side in Mass and Cass.

“The Boston Public Health Commission is investigating a case of human leptospirosis resulting in hospitalization,” the BPHC began in memos sent to the city’s first responders and to clinicians in Boston.

Leptospirosis is a potentially nasty disease spread by the urine of infected animal — often rats or mice. It’s a bacterial infection that’s normally rare in the U.S., per the BPHC’s fact sheet.

The potential symptoms read like a what’s what of what you don’t want: “fever, headache, myalgias, conjunctival suffusion, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, cough, and/or rash. Severe symptoms can include jaundice, renal failure, hemorrhage (especially pulmonary), aseptic meningitis, cardiac arrhythmias, pulmonary insufficiency, and hemodynamic collapse … even death.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), humans can become infected with leptospirosis through contact with urine (or other body fluids, except saliva) from infected animals or contact with items contaminated with infected bodily fluids. If not caught early and treated with antibiotics, the disease can be debilitating for several weeks.

The time between a person’s exposure to a contaminated source and becoming sick is 2 days to 4 weeks. Illness usually begins abruptly with fever and other symptoms. Leptospirosis may occur in two phases:

  • After the first phase (with fever, chills, headache, muscle aches, vomiting, or diarrhea) the patient may recover for a time but become ill again.
  • If a second phase occurs, it is more severe; the person may have kidney or liver failure or meningitis.

The illness lasts from a few days to 3 weeks or longer. Without treatment, recovery may take several months.

On the other coast, there has been an epidemic of leptospirosis in dogs around West Los Angeles. It is a potentially fatal infection in canines, and one veterinarian says it is an “epidemic.”

Leptospirosis, a bacterial disease that can lead to kidney failure and even death, isn’t new, nor is its effect on animals.

But one veterinarian in Los Angeles said they’d seen maybe a dozen cases over the span of 40 years of work. In the past three weeks, however, that same vet has seen triple that number of cases.

…Veterinary surgeon Dr. Alan Schulman says, based on the other veterinarians he’s spoken to on the Westside in recent weeks, 50 to 100 cases is a conservative estimate for how large the canine leptospirosis epidemic has become.

“It’s truly an epidemic,” Schulman said.

There is a vaccine for dogs available, though it is not 100% effective. Given the magnitude of the homeless problem in Los Angeles, making sure your pets are protected would be advisable.

Los Angeles City Council recently approved the creation of a program that would provide rental subsidies coupled with supportive services for 10,000 homeless individuals.

The “Housing Now” Program, proposed by Councilmember Mark Ridley-Thomas, who chairs the City’s Homelessness and Poverty Committee, was unanimously approved by LA City Council on September 21.

Proposed as a collaboration between the City and County of Los Angeles, the Housing Now Fund would provide rental subsidies coupled with supportive services for an additional 10,000 homeless individuals, according to Ridley-Thomas. Specifically, the program would target those with complex medical and behavioral health needs who reside on City streets.

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Comments

Check the DC area, seems a large concentration near Capitol Hill.

Who would have guessed t his is what you get when you force society to break down? sarc.

Hmmm, let’s see if our Public Health Officials act to contain this with the same vigor as Rona. My $ is on no.

The next wave will be dead cats who have decided to consume the dead rats who visited the Warfarin Hotel.. Then dead Coyotes from those who ate Pookems who was out too late at night.

    MajorWood in reply to MajorWood. | October 19, 2021 at 11:31 am

    Actually, it is better than that. I was out on my walk last night and came across some commotion in a driveway. Five crowes had decided that they didn’t want Mr Rat impinging on their territory, and they were summarily pecking it to death. The couple who lived at that house said they had been watching it for 10 minutes, but were concerned that breaking it up might bring them to the attention of the crowes. It is always refreshing to see nature solve a problem that humans wish to avoid. Now if I could only convince the feral humans to wear mickey mouse hats.

Import the third world, become the third world. Great huh?

Coasts?
Coasts is good.
Probably won’t affect our “south coast” at all.

For those of us that attended school when it still taught history, the cause and cure were discovered in the 1300s.

    henrybowman in reply to ghost dog. | October 18, 2021 at 1:42 pm

    Yes, but that’s from back when medical men were in charge of medical problems.
    Not politicians are in charge. The same dopes to take a year to figure out that maybe a weaponized virus from a city China WAS manufactured in that city’s weaponized virus factory, after all.
    With any luck, Boston and LA can be largely depopulated by the time these guys release the appropriate cure (which they sequestered immediately because it was being prescribed for Republicans).

    Milhouse in reply to ghost dog. | October 18, 2021 at 7:27 pm

    Huh? What did they call it back then? WP, which is usually reliable on such questions, says it was first described in 1886.

Let me see if I have this right. It is a violation of an group’s civil rights to clean up a homeless encampment and demand they avail themselves of available treatment and shelter both for their own sake and for public health, safety, and welfare. But I have no right to refuse an experimental treatment for a disease which poses very small risk to the majority of the population because my refusal threatens public health, safety, and welfare.

Well the answer to the homeless crisis that has spawned this appears to be getting Big Pharma involved in finding solutions.

That’s what happens when you feed the homeless.

Dr Drew predicted this more than a year ago

Rats can carry and spread disease? Especially when cohabiting with humans living in unsanitary conditions? And the more of them there are the worse the spread?

Who knew?

If only there was some historic precedent and evidence, or something. Other than in decolonized books written by now dead evil racist white supremacist white men, of course.

I guess the CDC, the huge government bureaucracy charged with ‘disease control’, is too busy to look into this. Too busy addressing more serious health issues. Like how guns somehow give people an uncontrollable urge to shoot other people. And how to force five year old kids to get an experimental vaccine to combat a virus for which their native immune system provides a 99.999+% survival rate.

    Ben Kent in reply to JHogan. | October 18, 2021 at 1:34 pm

    Don’t forget they have to spend many hours putting out promo material to STOP the epidemic of people wanted to remain the same biological sex. CDC cannot stop until everyone is vaccinated and every kid changes biological sex to the opposite.

    For instance, my kid is in high school in the NYC area. 18 kids out of 200 say they want to be the other sex. Seems another 15 are unsure. So 16% of the class thinks they are Trans or are considering it ? Mass hysteria and suggestive propaganda is what this nation is suffering from.

    Maybe we need to get rid of CDC. It seems CDC has become politicized and is now itself a public health emergency.

      CapeBuffalo in reply to Ben Kent. | October 18, 2021 at 2:26 pm

      The CDC has been politicized for a long time (AIDS and more)!. It is just one of the thousand spear points that the Left has been aiming at our beleaguered Constitution

Bring back vagrancy laws and clean up the streets. Put them to useful employment on a poor farm and weed out the mentally ill.

    Milhouse in reply to Elric. | October 18, 2021 at 7:36 pm

    Vagrancy laws are and always were unconstitutional. No legislature has the right to make poverty a crime. But neither is a city required to allow people to turn its streets into bedrooms, let alone toilets.

Never fear, soon the State will confiscate our private homes for the good of the collective, and the homeless problem will be solved. Shazam!
It’s the proper Marxist thing to do.

We’ve got rats on the west side, bed bugs uptown.
What a mess, this town’s in tatters, I’ve been shattered.

barbiegirl ny | October 19, 2021 at 9:57 am

But don’t worry, at least our “leaders” are safe from all this. This, and every other damn, evil, corrupt thing they’re doing to us.

Too bad the people who run these cities don’t ask themselves, “Which of their policies are contributing to their problems?”

IT’S BIBLICAL

First Came Joe Biden … (cinched the Dem nomination in Feb 2020)
Then Came the Disease … (Covid)
Then came Defeat … (Afghan)
Next Came the Rats
Soon to come . . . Locusts