Make sure dogs don’t swim in and drink from stagnant water like ponds, lakes or puddles.
Clinical signs might not show up in dogs for about seven days. Early signs can be vague — fever, lethargy, anorexia (loss of appetite), vomiting and diarrhoea.
We can prevent leptospirosis by limiting contact we and our pets have to sources of infection, and by vaccinating our dogs.
Less commonly, more severe disease can develop, which can be similar to what we see in dogs, and is known as Weil’s disease.
To learn more about the current cluster, we have started a research project. This will investigate the geographical distribution of the recent outbreak and the serovars of the bacteria involved. We are also collaborating with Sydney veterinarians who, with pet owners’ consent, are taking blood and urine samples from dogs before they get vaccinated against leptospirosis.
Poison in the mouse’s body
Whilst poison is the fastest way to get rid of a mouse infestation, it’s also one of the easiest ways your dog can get sick from eating a mouse. The chance of being poisoned is high either by eating the poison your dog finds in a bait trap, or by eating the poisoned mouse or poop itself.
This is a very real concern as the same amount of poison that you can kill a two-pound rat is the same amount that can also kill a dog. However, it will take a few days for the poison to take affect with your four-legged friend.
If your dog is anything like mine, he will lap at water puddles and pools in the yard and garden. This isn’t advisable, as rainwater can carry disease and make your dog ill.
With mice in particular, it could lead to your dog getting leptospirosis if there is infected mouse urine in the water.
Rodents will often carry ticks, and those ticks can pass disease from the mouse to your dog. For example, if the mouse has an infection in their blood that could transmit via a tick to your dog, and then possibly to you.
There’s even a risk of the plague, where dogs can become infected and then pass the disease to their human owners. Whilst rare, the plague can be treated in humans successfully with antibiotics.
There is also a chance that your dog could pick up a parasite from eating an infected mouse. Mice are prone to worms such as pinworm and tapeworm. Dogs cannot develop pinworm, but they are susceptible to tapeworm.
The CDC website says that dogs can get tapeworms also by:
Do all mice droppings have hantavirus?
Only some kinds of mice and rats can give people hantaviruses that can cause HPS. In North America, they are the deer mouse, the white-footed mouse, the rice rat, and the cotton rat. However, not every deer mouse, white-footed mouse, rice rat, or cotton rat carries a hantavirus.