Can old car dirt be toxic?

[pflaming]

Somewhere I picked up that mouse dung has some health risk potential. If that is true, to what extent? If that is true or false, are there any other potential irritants one should avoid and how?

[greg g]

mouse and other rodent droppings can harbor a virus that can stay viable withing the droppings for a long time.  The virus attacks the respiratory system.  The virus spores can become aerosolized when disturbed.  wearing respirators and safety goggles is a good idea when you suspect you might be dealing with rodent poop.  I have also seen folks say not to use the shop vac to clean it up as the viral material too small to be stopped by the filter and the exhaust air from the vac can spread the viral material far and wide in the work area.  

 

I did see a suggestion that suggested spraying down the matter with a cleaning solution  prior to using a hepa filter vacuum can minimize the threat, by reducing the tendency of the material to spread.  Kinda like wetting down asbestos be fore it is removed.

 

Vehicles should be cleaned out doors not inside where the material might be dispersed and confined within a shop or garage.   I suppose if you had a hose on the discharge side of a shop vac so you could direct the exhaust air out side and or away from the work area might also be helpful.

 

Guess it has a lot to do with if you live or the car has lived in an area where the virus is prevalent, how strong you immune sustem is and how much you trust breathing and eye protection systems. 

[Ulu]

Around here we have a dirt-borne fungus that infects the lungs, causing "Valley Fever". My brother-in-law passed away from this at 58. He was an Ag teacher, and this is a disease farmers sometimes get here in central California. He got it in Turlock.

 

I do not know if it lives in dirt that's not "in the ground", but I suspect that it can live in any dry soil for a long time, and it gets active when it hits your wet mucus membranes.

 

I wouldn't breathe any dust I didn't have to, no matter where it was from. Even absent the dung, dust can cause you all sorts of issues.

[linus6948]

(I wouldn't breathe any dust I didn't have to, no matter where it was from. Even absent the dung, dust can cause you all sorts of issues.)

 

Those are truly words to live by, or perhaps to live longer by. I do my best now to wear the appropriate mask whenever I`m working in dusty conditions or handling a possible lung irritant like the 5yds of garden mulch I spread last week. So many people are clueless about protecting themselves in dusty environments and don`t realize the permanent damage they can be doing to themselves.

Most people don`t realize that many things that they take into their lungs never leave as your body has no way to process or get rid of them. Classic examples being asbestos, fiberglass, concrete dust, sheet-rock taping compound dust, body bondo dust,coal dust and dozens of other substances we can breath in can become permanent residents in our lungs.

Regular lung screenings are part of my life now after 30+ years working at facility's and installations built in the era when asbestos was still considered the "Magic Mineral" and it was used everywhere. In some electrical substations it used to fall like snow from the "fire-proofed" beams and ceilings everytime you opened a door and walked thru. It was very pretty to see, it actually sparkled, in fact in the old movies flaked asbestos was used to simulate falling snow because it photographed so well.

[46CoupeSD]

mouse and other rodent droppings can harbor a virus that can stay viable withing the droppings for a long time.  The virus attacks the respiratory system...  

 

Greg speaks of hantavirus - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hantavirus

 

I spent a summer catching/tagging/releasing small rodents for ecology research, and was terribly afraid of catching it while cleaning our live-traps. OSHA would not have been happy...