wanta hanta, don’t you wanta…

There was some minor internal debate when beginning to write yesterday’s entry as to whether it would end up with the title it did, or something referencing mouse poop and/or the hantavirus (like this one). But since I ended up writing two separate entries, I get to use both. Hooray!

Yesterday when I went into work, I sat down at the desk and just looked around like I normally do. When all of a sudden I noticed these little brown rice-sized things ON the desk. I picked one of them up and looked at it more closely. A fleeting thought passed through my mind, “I think that’s mouse poop. I’m pretty sure that’s what the sanitation textbook said mouse poop looked like. Oh wow. I’m touching feces,” before I decided to use scotch tape to pick up/preserve the remainder of the poop that I saw, so that I could use the internet connection on my phone to look up “mouse poop.”

Preliminary searches confirmed the mouse poop theory, and deeper research led to widespread paranoia about hantavirus. Now, I washed my hands as soon as I realized it was potentially fecal matter, of course. And short of actually putting the infected matter into your mucous membranes or broken skin, you can really only get hantavirus from breathing it in (for instance if you were to vaccuum up mouse-poop, particles of it would get into the air). Furthermore, hantavirus is far more common in the western states, and even then, its extremely rare. As in, only six states have reported more than 30 cases. So I don’t *think* I have anything to worry about, but if i get flu-like symptoms anytime within the next month or so, I might want to get that checked on. Heh.