[krashnburn200]

So can mouse poop, but it's extraordinarily rare so no one really worries about it, well no one sane. Err present company excluded ;)

http://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus/hps/

It's rare enough that individual cases end up on TV.

[goda90]

I took a wilderness survival course in college that included multiple days in the wilderness for the final. In over 40 years there had only been two deaths. One was dehydration due to a stupid fad diet and the other was hantavirus. It looks like the flu until it's too late. So if you are around mice droppings and get flu like symptoms soon after, get to a doctor soon.

[jandrese]

If you are out in the wilderness you are always around rodent droppings. Hantavirus is one of those things that backpacking magazines freak out about, but it's so incredibly rare that there's basically no point in wasting brain cells worrying about it. It's down in the "act of God" ways you might die (meteor strike, lightning, etc...).

[goda90]

Yeah, we were told not to worry too much, just to be wary since someone had died 30 years prior. What I've read is that if you're in an enclosed space with a lot of rodent droppings(say an abandoned cottage or something) then there is some risk, but open air is safe.

[chrisseaton]

> I took a wilderness survival course in college

That's interesting - do you mean as a part of a social club, or actual scholarly study of survival techniques? Or maybe to support a major in something like archeology? Or maybe a military college?

[safeignorance]

It's not terribly uncommon for colleges to require some form of physical education like in high school. The motivations are varied -- from legal mandate (for state schools) all the way to subsidizing the athletic staff with tuition dollars for BS courses.

And even where there aren't strict requirements, students sometimes end up with a few extra "free" course credits (e.g. to stay full time for a final semester). Uni staff/faculty are often willing to teach a course like this because it's fun and they get a couple grand for teaching young people about their hobby for an hour every week.

FWIW I took a rock climbing course like this (last semester, had a few extra credits my scholarship paid for in any case, and didn't have time for a real course due to travel). There was just enough "scholarly study" to make the course barely legit (read 2 books and discussed safety techniques in a science-y way), but 99.9% of the time was spent climbing.

[goda90]

It was an actual elective class as part of the "Recreation Management" major at my university, but I took it for fun. We talked about and practiced techniques for building fire, shelter, and tools, as well as foraging for food and being wary of physical and mental problems that arise in survival situations. Supposedly back in the day(70s and 80s) it was actually a month long trek out in the wilderness and some students even took it to make up for some sort of probation for misconduct. For our final exam we just had three nights, two of them alone, out in the Utah desert. Our teacher was a Native American, former Army Ranger who had been doing bushcraft since a very young age.

[chrisseaton]

I don't think any universities in the UK do these kind of diverse elective courses. Sometimes you can do one or two courses from outside your major, but they're courses from another major rather than something entirely standalone. Is this what is meant by a 'liberal arts' education?

The UK aggressively specialises. I started to specialise towards CS at around 16, and started to drop arts and other subjects then, two years before university, and at university I never took anything outside the CS course (apart from one Latin course, but that was unusual because I could already program).

[pvaldes]

Hantaviruses and arenaviruses are typical of rodents if I'm not wrong. Rodents are everywhere, so having raccoons shouldn't really make a difference.