Compost - Health Warning

BBC News this morning.
Well worth reading.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11167176

 

9 cases of it since 1984. How many bags of compost used by gardeners in that time? You probably have a better chance of winning the lottery.

I think I'll take my chances!

 

Good spot Dave,

I was handling stone that had been kept under plastic so it was damp. I should have thought about the fact that there were rats on site.

Couple of days later I dropped like a sack of spuds, i'd caught weil's desease.
Fortunately I realised what it was & dragged myself to the docs for a hectic course of antibiotics.

It was more than 3 weeks before I could get back to work, felt terrible.

 

You were luck Ziggy.. and timely action prevented you a lot more hassle.
I was in the water industry for many years and had to attend much training on water born health hazards.
Veil`s is certianly one of the worst.
Thanks for the info Dave and noted.

 

It's great that you knew what it was. I visited an out of hours GP clinic after the worst fever and hallucinating for a couple of nights. I told the GP who I saw that I'd always been worried about Weil's disease but she told me the incubation period was too short. Couple of days later I started to turn yellow and ended up in A&E.

I was placed in a single bed observation room right next to the nurses station for a week so it wasn't all bad :wink:

Horrible disease though, wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, glad you had the presence of mind to know what it was, I just wished I'd pushed for tests. They were the worst couple of days I've had for a long time until it was diagnosed.

 

Hey Axl,

Thats odd, my incubation was too short as well, only 2 days, maybe the book needs re writing. Any doctors reading this ?

We have to be aware of catching strange things in our job too, lymes disease, plague, smallpox etc.

One guy caught the plague after digging a trench in a churchyard, got rushed off to the tropical diseases unit in london, he survived.

Another company had to stop work moving lead coffins from a vault, lead coffins bend when you move them, exposing the corpses, first 2 were dry, but the third was a slimer, smallpox risk.s00k

 

Fogot to say, a lad in Crewkerne caught Weil's disease & didn't get it treated straight away. Sadly he died a year later.

 

Interesting Dave, are we really getting more diseases these days or is it just my imagination.

"Doctors saw him in the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, central Scotland, after eight days of trembling, confusion, lethargy and shortness of breath, but initially failed to diagnose the problem."

Sounds like a hangover, no wonder the doctors were confused, it sounds like he was on the hard stuff.:lollol:

 

No, it's just better reported now, with the internet and 24 hour media reporting. In the Developed World, humans haven't been so healthy for hundreds of years.

 

yeah I think your right SG

 

.

As a SS and H&S rep, in work it is drummed into us to take care of ourselves and others round us.

I have got into the habit of almost always wearing gloves of some kind when gardening,especially when working with manure or garden compost.

Went on a set of H&S courses a few years ago, there were a couple of lads from the water board there, they mentioned that weils disease was one of the deadliest water borne diseases they could get and that some older men hated having to enter tunnels in case they came across rats.

Hope you all have got a Tetanus injection, they are free!

Cheers!

 

wow, all these nasty diseases, I thought most had died out. It's quite a story to be able to tell people you caught the plague and liveds00k
Ziggy and Axl, sounds like you both had a very lucky escape. I might just wrap myself in sterile bandages and go back to bed...the world is way to dangerous... sounds like a good excuse :snz: