Texas Raccoon Update November 2019
Photo Credit: Josh Tidsbury via Flickr
In recent Texas wildlife news, the rise of the rodent-carried disease, known as murine Typhus, is causing alarm amongst residents. Often thought to only be carried and passed along by rats and mice, the disease is more likely to be passed along by animals that many do not deem as “disease-carrying,” such a raccoons. Raccoons wander into yards and their fleas, carrying the disease, jump onto household pets, which then are let into your home. The fleas then can be transferred to you, which is how one Texas man contracted the disease. Many doctors, however, are failing to properly diagnose the illness, since it often presents many symptoms similar to the common flu.
In other news regarding raccoons and wildlife in Texas, one Texas woman is taking it upon herself to help trap, rehabilitate, and release injured wildlife back into their natural habitat. The Texas resident is licensed and certified to do so and many of the animals she receives come from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Most of the injured animals that she sees are trapped and kept illegally and as a result are either improperly cared for or used for illegal purposes. She takes care of the injured or orphaned animals on her small plot of land and houses them in a shed she has converted into a kennel-like enclosure.
Learn more about raccoons here: Raccoon removal
The Critter Squad Inc. (713) 396-6030
How Fleas Hop Onto Humans And Spread Murine Typhus
As Bill Jones and his wife Kathy Murray of Austin found out in 2008, getting sick with murine typhus can be scary business. When a high fever persisted for five days, Jones sought help at a local hospital. There, he spent nine more terrifying days, while doctors searched for an explanation for his symptoms and nearly operated on his liver unnecessarily.
“They called me and said I needed to get back over to the hospital. They had determined Bill has a dark area on his liver, ‘cause they were testing everything. And that he was going to need to go in for surgery,” Murray says.
Alarmed, Murray sought out a second opinion from a specialist who found that her husband’s liver was fine. Meanwhile, she had become convinced that he had the bacterial infection, murine typhus, known to be spread by rats and their fleas. But she struggled to get his doctors to take this idea seriously. The disease had been extremely rare in Travis County, which includes Austin, for decades. But in 2008, seemingly out of the blue, it would sicken 33 people there, most of whom required hospitalization. Read more
Read more about diseases and problems associated with raccoons.