If you live in the MidWest - Monkeypox is spreading
 

Geez, first Sars, now Monkeypox, starting to smell like BioWarfare to me.

Prairie Dog Sickness May Be Monkeypox

MADISON, Wis. - A virus related to smallpox that has never been detected in the Western Hemisphere may be the cause of a mysterious disease spreading from pet prairie dogs to people across the upper Midwest, health officials said Saturday.

Dr. James Hughes, director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (news - web sites), said a group of prairie dogs sold from a suburban Chicago pet distributor appears to be infected with the monkeypox virus, a member of the same viral family that causes smallpox but is not nearly as deadly.

Monkeypox has typically been found in West African rain forests, Hughes said. The death rate among infected humans has ranged from 1 percent to 10 percent.

Hughes said although monkeypox is spread primarily through rodents in Africa, scientists haven't ruled out person-to-person transmission.

"We're in the very early stages of classifying this virus," Hughes said. "We're not certain."

Since early May, 17 possible cases have been reported in Wisconsin in people as young as 4 and as old as 48. One possible case has been reported in Illinois and one has been reported in Indiana, health officials from all three states said.

They appeared to have been exposed to prairie dogs ? rodents whose popularity as pets has grown in recent years. They reported fever, coughs, rashes and swollen lymph nodes.

CDC and state health officials are still researching the disease with samples from the infected prairie dogs and humans, but the virus appears susceptible to the anti-viral drug Cidofovir, Hughes said. He isn't aware of any long-term aftereffects of monkeypox.

No one has died or become severely ill in the current outbreak, Hughes said. But four people in Wisconsin had to be hospitalized at Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital, hospital spokesman Mark McLaughlin said. Two remained hospitalized in satisfactory condition Saturday.

Authorities don't believe bioterrorism was involved.

Investigators have traced the origin of the outbreak to a pet distributor in Villa Park, Ill. That distributor had a giant Gambian rat, indigenous to African countries, that may have infected batches of prairie dogs, Hughes said.

SK Exotics, a South Milwaukee pet distributor, bought prairie dogs from the Villa Park distributor and imported them to Wisconsin.

Two pet stores, Hoffer TropicLife Pets in Milwaukee and Rainbow Pets in Shorewood, a Milwaukee suburb, bought some dogs from SK Exotics.

More prairie dogs from Villa Park found their way to northern Wisconsin through a Wausau swap meet, said Dr. Mark Wegner, chief of the Wisconsin Communicable Disease Epidemiology Section.

Wisconsin agriculture officials have taken several emergency steps since word of the outbreak broke earlier this week.

The state Department of Health and Family Services issued an emergency order Friday banning the sale, importation and display of prairie dogs.

Also Friday, acting state veterinarian Dr. Robert Ehlenfeldt imposed quarantines on SK Exotics, Hoffer TropicLife Pets, Rainbow Pets and the Dorchester home of Tammy Kautzer, who apparently sells animals to swap meets, Gilson said.

The quarantines prohibit movement of any prairie dogs or mammals that come in contact with them.

"I wouldn't want to do it any other way than to follow the rules and find out exactly what's going on," said Eileen Whitmarsh, co-owner of Rainbow Pets.

Calls left at Kautzer's home and Hoffer TropicLife Pets were not returned. No listing could be found for SK Exotics.

Whitmarsh said she got two female prairie dogs from SK Exotics on May 5. Neither looked sick at first, she said, but one eventually began to look tired.

She said the store immediately quarantined them. SK Exotics took them back on May 12, she said.

Whitmarsh said she got sick in mid-May with blisters, coughing and a 101-degree fever. Hospital staff gave her aspirin, told her it was a viral infection and she went home, she said.

Whitmarsh said she didn't feel better and ended up going to West Allis Memorial Hospital five days later, where she was given antibiotics. She finally felt better around Memorial Day, she said.

Meanwhile, state and federal investigators are still trying to track down animals sold from the Villa Park distributor. The source of the Gambian rat is still unknown, they said.

what about madcow?

i see those people sometimes.

want to think about something REALLY scary?

What if they're right?

we got this crazy long-haired guy that wanders around downtown with crazy sayings on his shirt. never seen "the end is near"... but i think a few messages about religion and government. mostly government, i think.


funny though, i haven't heard a thing about this prarie dog disease. and how the fuck does a person get a prarie dog disease? are they fucking them??

There's an asian guy who walks around the financial district in SF on weekdays with shit like that. His signs have some incoherent babble about teknotronic mind control rays.. classic schitzo shit.

I used to work downtown, and a I'd see him most days.. then one day I noticed an ad for a local sandwich shop on the back of his sign. Then another, then 3 or 4. Turns out some local businesses have decided to sponsor him.. they get space on the back of his sign, he gets free meals.

Funny shit.

Gee ya think? It started to smell like bio/germ warefare to me when they were making a big deal out of WNV.

Wasn't there a movie recnetly about that?... how the bad guys had a pool of mosquitoes or something infected with some bad stuff?

But yeah.. I'm sure we'll have our own version of the Iraq minister sometime here soon assuring us that nothing out of the ordinary is going on......"There is no biological or germ warfare being committed against our nation, nobody is sick anywhere, everything is under control."

I'm always pesimistic about stuff like this though... it probably was the giant rat that infected the prarie dogs.

Hey what the fuck Im 10 minutes from Villa Park. Watch Out

Well, I'm about 3 miles from where the 9/11 Anthrax letters hit the National Enquirer's corporate offices in Florida. That building is still there all taped off with Anthrax spores inside of it while the powers that be figure out how to get rid of them without them going airborne into Boca and all over Palm Beach County where a lot of the richest people in the country have homes. Everyone is still freaked out about it just sitting there and no one has an answer yet on what to do for an effective cleanup.

So when it hits close to home, and the government officials played it down initially like it was no big problem, you worry and don't believe anything coming out of Washington.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/159500...uilding300.jpg

http://www.firefighting.com/files/im...rax1094(2).jpg

Do you know anyone with one of those things as a pet?

I remember my grandpa telling me about when the cows on his dairy farm got anthrax they would just kill them and burn them up....

Why dont they just get the important stuff out of there... data, whatever else & just incinerate the place. Worked for the farmers.

Yeh, so you know the feeling. I'm only 5 minutes from where Anthrax fucking spores are still sitting inside that sealed up office building in Boca.

I'm just worried about a fricking Hurricane hitting this area this season, since they are predicting a lot of big stormes, and cracking open one of the windows or something.

When its so close it is a genuine concern.

I think the big concern is airborne escape of the spores. They would have done something by now if they could do it. It unreal that that stuff is still sitting there.

Problem probably is like I said above a lot of heavy hitter powerful Floridans are within a mile from that building. So I'm sure there is a lot of political pressure not to fuck up the cleanup.

No I know of noone with those kind of pets. Fuckers:BangBang:

Yeh, I'm the biggest animal lover, but I always worry after I walk my dog and he's licked like 20 spots of other dogs pee and he goes and tries to lick my face when I unleash him, what the fuck could be crawling around in his mouth.

When you think about it you got bird shit, dog shit, cat shit, all sorts of wild animals around shitting, and then it rains and it all gets mixed together like some nasty ass home brew.

I always worry about my kid when he goes out to play with his friend and they roll on the ground playing and stuff what could be hopping a ride on his skin and clothes and then he comes inside and brings it on the carpet.