There was a mouse, where?.....
 

Not there on the stair, even in old amsterdam, in the crown lounge as I'm sitting opposite the food area. Two of them just ran past and went behind the brown seats.

Told the staff at the desk and they said they know, it's because of the building work outside that's forcing them into the crown lounge (???). I'll bet they are not even gold or platinum members!!

Have regularly seen mice at various outlets through the airport (AMS), even before the building work. They need to set more traps.

This has been an issue for ages - I believe there are various mice-references throughout the various lounge threads.

Anywhere there's food, there's gonna be mice. It says very little about hygienic standards. Especially if there's construction going on.

I like restaurants/movie theaters/bars that employ the simplest solution: a cat.

Perhaps they saw the animated movie Ratatouille.
We might expect significant catering enhancements in the coming months...

Ulxima

Hurray! They're back! Haven't seen any since the large refurbishment works of the lounges many years ago. :)

Close to the mouse pad and PCs? :D:D

I'm amazed any creature could get past the AMS dragons.

As AtlanticX says: introduce cats. I remember seeing cats at a Russian airport... And mice in the Crown lounge.

Cleanliness could be a bit of an issue at Schiphol though, I remember not too long ago getting a bad case of "sticky shoes" after walking on some unidentifiable sticky mess covering the entire floor on one particular aisleway. I hoped it was spilled soft drinks given the proximity of a food outlet. I hoped.

Can't remember coming across that problem at another airport to be honest. Though I remember the water of a flooded restroom spilling onto the concourse at Memphis Airport numerous years ago.

Do these mice have platinum cards or are they flying business, or are they freeloading off the rest of us? KLM needs to do something about the riff raff.

Like I said in the Crown Lounge catering thread, I won't touch the open food in the lounge. I find the AMS lounges really on the limit, hygiene wise, these days.

Indeed. They've always been there. I recall seeing them (or their ancestors, more likely) in the then RoyalWing lounge decades ago.

I've always been a big fan of these intrepid, crafty, enterprising and really cute little mice. In the lounge, that is. Any mouse who visits me at home can look forward to an early demise.

I had lunch on the terrace of the JNB Intercontinental a few weeks ago, where I was joined by a mouse that scurried around under the table looking for scraps. It obviously had its ambitious eyes on the far more delectable selection on the table itself, but had a hard time finding a discreet route up. After coming to the conclusion that my legs were not after all the best scaling ladders ever invented, it had to concede defeat.

TK's IST lounge, to which KL's offerings cannot hold a candle, may or may not harbor mice, but it certainly has its very own flock of house sparrows. Come daybreak they all start chirping and flying around amongst the numerous potted plants and trees. Hygienic their presence is not, but it does endow the lounge with a certain bucolic charm.

Johan

The obsession with hygiene in the West often goes overboard. Many theories and some evidence also suggest that the cleanliness we 'enjoy' here in the West has lead to a greater amount of allergy, astma and diminished immune development/priming which has consequences later in life. Some might even argue that a few delightful birds flying around is good for the health in the long run.

Much of the obsession with hygiene, especially in bureaucratic countries such as the Netherlands, has as much to do with actual health as with bureaucrats who feel the need to enforce rules because that is, after all, the rule. Never mind that many rules don't often make much sense.

Just the same, I would argue a few mice running around Schiphol is hardly a cause for concern. As long as they don't end up in aircraft holds and keep out of the food, it's really much ado about nothing.

I could not agree more. Growing up on a farm is great for the immune system.

I'm an avid fan of lounge fauna, but the difference between mice and sparrows is that the former do not relieve themselves in flight. In the TK lounge they have erected netting over the second floor seating areas, one need only look up to see why.

Johan

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