Hanta!

The annual fall rodent invasion is under way, with four field mice offed by the “Better Mouse Trap” (a brand name) under the kitchen sink in recent weeks. I don’t know if it’s really better than earlier models, but baited with peanut butter it does seem to draw them to their doom. It will have to do unless I can pinpoint their port of entry, but so far no luck.

As I was cleaning up droppings, something in the back of my mind made me think of hantaviruses. As well I should, since further investigation told me that rodent droppings can spread the virus, which causes hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a condition that sounds a lot worse than merely unpleasant. Fortunately, the risk is vanishingly small in Illinois: two cases in the state since 1993, according to the CDC. Even if it were underreported by five times, that would still be only 10 poor bastards who came down with it in 12 years. More people have won the state lottery in the last dozen years, and the odds of that can’t be called good.

I wondered where I’d heard of it, though. One of those things you read about, file away, and recall when the right stimulus comes along. As first, I thought I’d read about it years ago, in one of the genre of scare books published in the early 1970s. We had a few, like The Population Bomb, around the house. But it turns out that the hantavirus was identified only in 1993, so I didn’t read about it 30-odd years ago.

Maybe it was Lassa fever, another rodent-vectored disease, that figured in end-of-humanity scenarios in the bestsellers of doom. Big things were promised for that disease, native to western Africa, but upstarts like AIDS and (maybe) bird flu have moved onto the world stage instead, while Lassa seems to languish in Africa.

None of this means I won’t die from hanta or Lassa or bird flu, or worse, someone else in the house won’t. Remote but always possible. But not worth worrying about after I finish reading the CDC web site.