A teacher triggered an international health alert in Scotland after contracting a potentially life-threatening virus from her pet rats, it has emerged.
The mystery condition so concerned doctors at a Glasgow hospital they sent samples to Porton Down, the UK’s main laboratory for rare and imported pathogens.
It diagnosed the woman had Seoul hantavirus, which is rare in Britain but increasingly present in pet rats. The 51-year-old mum-of-three visited Queen Elizabeth University Hospital with a fever, diarrhoea, vomiting and fatigue lasting five days.
She also had bleeding sores on her face, blood in her urine, red eyes, a temperature of almost 39˚C, and low blood pressure. Her 12-year-old daughter had suffered a fever a week before but recovered.
Doctors struggled to explain her symptoms until it emerged the woman kept 37 rats in cages in her bedroom. Dr James Shepherd, a clinical research fellow at Glasgow University, said: “The patient and her daughter reported kissing the rats.”
The alert, in 2019, was revealed in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.
The woman spent 12 days in hospital and was given the all-clear a month later.
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