Yeah, letting rodents roam at will has never harmed anyone, oh wait except they are known disease vectors and were one of the main factors causing the Great Plague in Europe killing half the population.

Thanks for drawing our attention to this major contemporary public health problem. You have put your finger right at the heart of KLM's problems. Forget about competition from the MEA carriers. KL's real challenge is finding some way of combatting the loss of its passengers to the regular plague epidemics at Schiphol. :)

FWIW, you seem to be missing the point. The point is not that rodents do not carry pathogenic agents or that farms are free from pathogenic agents. The point is that moderate exposure to pathogens increases rather than decreases health and that obsession with attempting to eradicate all pathogens has had a negative impact on public health.

Clearly, uncontrolled proliferation of rodents can be a public health hazard. It does not follow from this that the occasional, even regular, sighting of rodents signifies that there is a major public health issue in the lounges.

Thanks for the warning, I shall henceforth keep an sharp eye out for lounge dragons exhibiting bubonic plague symptoms.

Johan

Not to be too pedantic, but plague is not carried by mice but rather by a particular kind of flee that live on rats. ;) Mice at Schiphol are probably cleaner than many people living in urban slums, unfortunately.

In my experience if you are seeing a few out during the day and around people that there are many more in the walls/floors that only come out at night or when no one is around. They are good at reproducing :D

Since the fleas were carried by rodents the presence of the rodents was a major factr facilitating the spread of that disease. And that's obviously just an example. Lack of sanitation is a major factor in low life expectancy in the Third World today.

And I would agree with JumboJet - what you see in mice/rats is typically just the tip of the iceberg. They are always around - but a well-controlled presence is one that you don't notice while sitting in a lounge.

I doubt cats are a cure if it was rats. One of the times I was in Singapore, you could see the rats wondering along the side streets at boat key. These were big rats. There was an average cats sitting on a chair at the end of the restaurant watching them, I swear the rats were bigger. Though Singapore cats are all skin and bone.

They should eat more rats, then.

Johan

As an immunologist, I cannot agree more about the bad consequence of the clean early life environment (When I was a kid in China, eczema is unheard of or complained among my kinder garden mates, but all my colleagues/friends' kids seem to have some degree of atopic dermatitis). But I will be a bit worried about the chance that rodents come up to aircrafts and tempering with wires/tubes, etc.)

More likely, the rats would have a fair go at the cats!

And Singapore's reticulated pythons will happily eat both for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Johan