These people would have been saved

Mrs. Valve

Dizzy Broad
Oct 6, 2004
9,959
3,004
523
The QFH
Marklar
₥3,799
Had Nev snatched up the little buggers first.

article taken from the Providence Journal. Yes, that's right, this happened minutes away from where I grew up.

PROVIDENCE -- A pet store chain linked to a rodent virus that killed three human transplant patients said today it is testing its breeding stocks of hamsters, guinea pigs and mice for signs of the virus.


Three patients died from the lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus after receiving organs from a single donor, health officials said yesterday. They believe the donor may have contracted the virus from a pet hamster purchased at a PETsMART store in Warwick.



A spokesman for Phoenix-based PETsMART said it has asked companies that supply hamsters, guinea pigs and mice to the Warwick store to test their animals. An undisclosed number of suppliers are affected, though not all those that supply the chain, he said.


"We're taking samples of the breeding stock and also some of the juvenile pets from our vendors for testing," spokesman Bruce Richardson said. Richardson would not say how many animals will have to undergo tests, which require the animals to be euthanized.


He said the chain regularly tests for other diseases, but LCMV is not routinely tested for because it is rare. It is not clear if the hamster came to the organ donor's household already infected with LCMV, Richardson said.


"To our knowledge, we didn't sell any sick hamsters," he said. So far, there are no indications of an LCMV outbreak among the chain's suppliers, he said.


Investigators from the federal Centers for Disease Control were testing the dead hamster to confirm if it was the cause of the deaths.


Dozens of hamsters, mice and rats were removed from the Warwick store by health officials last week and this week. Richardson said he believes the CDC plans to euthanize and test them all.


"We believe the hamster was the source, but we can't rule out a common house mouse," CDC spokesman Dave Daigle said.


The three patients died a few weeks after undergoing the transplant surgeries in mid-April. A liver recipient and a double-lung recipient were from Massachusetts. A kidney transplant recipient was from Rhode Island. Another Rhode Island patient who received a kidney became ill, but is recovering.


Public health officials said it was only the second documented case of the virus, which is associated with exposure to rodent waste, being spread through an organ transplant. They stressed that the LCMV virus is rare in humans.


"We would encourage people who are on the (transplant) waiting list not to be concerned with this," state health director David Gifford said. "This is an extremely rare and unusual event."


Health officials discovered the connection between the donor and the patients after a doctor at the Rhode Island hospital where one of the transplants was performed reported an unusual viral death. Investigators traced the death to the organ donor.


Gifford did not identify the patients.


The double lung transplant was performed at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston, the liver transplant at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and both kidney transplants at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, officials said.


Gifford said there are no plans to begin testing other donor organs for the virus since it is so rare and testing could take several days, potentially making the organs unusable. He said he believed there was no commercially available test for the virus.


Two other people received corneas from the Rhode Island donor in operations outside the United States. Officials from the CDC said they were trying to track where they went.


The LCMV virus is commonly found in house mice but usually produces only flu-like symptoms in humans. It has also been associated with neurological illness and miscarriage in pregnant women.


In this case, however, the victims were transplant recipients, who were taking very large doses of immunosuppresant medication as part of their treatment, which can allow viruses to grow and multiply and cause an "overwhelming infection," Gifford said.


Only one previous instance of LCMV causing a transplant-related death has been reported - in Wisconsin in December 2003 - but it wasn't definitively linked to rodent exposure, said Dr. Matthew Kuehnert of the CDC.

Note to self, after getting my new liver, don't go near hampsters :eek: I feel all warm and fuzzy that I get to play with mice starting next week!
 
Yeah, I saw that on Yahoo earlier today. Sad that those people had to die because of someone's small rodent waste fetish.
 
JJ Lady said:
Why do they have to kill them to test them? :(


They should kill them as opposed to testing them, in my opinion. Cheaper. No need to see if a corpse has a disease, just burn the thing. It's like when a herd of cattle gets mad cow disease. You kill all the cattle, just to be safe. We're talking about a disease that has killed people, so wipe out the vermin that bore it and start over.

THIS IS WHY SARAH GOT THE PLAGUE
 
JJ Lady said:
Read:

Richardson would not say how many animals will have to undergo tests, which require the animals to be euthanized.


Yeah I just saw that, and like a ninja changed my post to reflect that fact.


I was never here.
 
Sarcasmo said:
They should kill them as opposed to testing them, in my opinion. Cheaper. No need to see if a corpse has a disease, just burn the thing. It's like when a herd of cattle gets mad cow disease. You kill all the cattle, just to be safe. We're talking about a disease that has killed people, so wipe out the vermin that bore it and start over.

THIS IS WHY SARAH GOT THE PLAGUE
Have to make sure that's where the infection came from, cuz if not - there's bigger problems afoot