What are the chances to catch rodent-transmitted illnesses while hiking?
Small warning: This question comes from a germophobe point of view, so please keep this in mind while giving an answer.
I love hiking, but I'm worried of what kind of germs (read virus, bacteria and any parasite) you could get from touching things in the ground. The list of things are normal, natural objects like stones, sticks, leaves (dry or not), etc. My particular worry are rodent-transmitted illnesses like leptospirosis and hantavirus, since these transmit through the urine and feces of rats, and I don't know if the objects I get from the ground are contaminated or were at some point exposed to contamination. In addition, it has to be considered that hands or skin touching the objects might be cut, the hands might touch mouth, nose, eyes or ears, and also what happens if one eats afterwards.
For additional context, when I say hiking, I mean hiking in USA Northeastern forests, in public state parks, on one of the trails (not outside the trails). My hikes are not particularly long, certainly not more than a few hours and do not involve the use of shelters or public bathrooms.
My question is, what are the chances that a human can get sick of any rodent-transmitted illness by touching natural objects while hiking?
This post was sourced from https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/q/20878. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
Very slim to be almost nonexistent.
From personal experience, I have not gotten any disease from touching/eating things while hiking. I am typically hiking in the midwest on and off trails.
Diseases from rodents are not something to be concerned about. First, while they are moving along leaving urine and feces about, they are not covering everything. So that reduces your risk of exposure. A further reduction is that not all rodents will be carriers.
The second consideration would be the number of cases of the disease each year. The US had 27 cases of leptospirosis and the CDC has recorded just over 700 cases since 1993 as of Jan 2017 of hantavirus. Considering that there are over 44 million hikers in the US, many of which are east of the Mississippi means that the chances of getting these diseases are very small. (A further point being that I would imagine that most people get the disease from handling rodents rather than secondary contact)
This suggests that your chances are incredibly slim for contracting any diseases from rodents by just going on hikes.
That being said, you should be concerned with lyme and other illnesses that are transmitted via mosquitoes and ticks. But that can be mitigated with proper clothing and insect repellent.
This post was sourced from https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/a/20880. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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