Monkeypox virus causes big stir on farm
By GRAEME ZIELINSKI
gzielinski@journalsentinel.com@journalse Last Updated: June 10, 2003
Dorchester - Schyan had a fever. Nothing too serious for a 3-year-old, thought her mother, Tammy Kautzer. But better to be safe, so she took the girl to the Abbotsford clinic a few miles away.
At the end of a routine examination, Kautzer mentioned offhandedly that the little girl had been nipped on the right index finger a few days before by a cranky prairie dog purchased at a 4-H pet swap in Wausau. "It didn't seem like a big deal," said Kautzer, a warehouse worker in a nearby Tombstone Pizza plant.
Weeks later, things have become a big deal.
The Kautzers are quarantined in their farmhouse, epidemiologists are scrambling around the Midwest and monkeypox, a viral disease related to smallpox, has grabbed the headlines.
Meanwhile, back at the little farm on Pine Road where the first confirmed case of the disease was reported, Tammy Kautzer, 28, and her husband of seven years, Steve, 38, are recovering with their only daughter from the rare illness, killing time until they are allowed to leave their home. That will be in a few days, when the scabs fall off.
On Monday, Tammy was sorting through a horse trailer filled with heirlooms. Steve was mowing the lawn. And Schyan (pronounced like Cheyenne) was swinging in her backyard amid the braying of a Noah's Ark-full of animals and the buzzing of media types who have swarmed over the Kautzers' 5-acre plot to learn more about the origins of the illness.
Big excitement for these parts, said Steve Kautzer, a laborer at the Northwest Hardwoods sawmill nearby, something to rival the Fourth of July. The doctors have told them to avoid human contact. They stocked up on the essentials, and a case of Miller Genuine Draft, before medical officials asked them to stay at home.
Schyan, with stark blue eyes and bolts of flowing red hair, squirmed on a pet carrier that housed Chuckles, a second prairie dog also ill from monkeypox. The Kautzers have decided to keep Chuckles because it is believed they are immune from contracting the disease again.
Schyan sucked her thumb and displayed the wound, a discolored lesion, from the first prairie dog that is thought to have infected her.
She had been handling the animal a few weeks ago when it was showing signs of being ill, its eyes crusted over. As she was putting the animal back in its cage, it bit her.
Schyan's wound was fine at first, but it soon grew and became discolored, her mother said.
The prairie dog had been found dead the day of the trip to the clinic, Tammy Kautzer said, so she was told by a worried doctor to retrieve it from the garbage. By that point, the possibility of rabies, or even bubonic plague, was on the table.
"They sent the head to Madison and the lymph nodes to St. Joseph's (Hospital in Marshfield)," Tammy Kautzer said.
Meanwhile, their daughter's condition worsened, and she was admitted to St. Joseph's. Soon afterward, both parents got lesions. Steve's tracked up his arms; some are still visible on the left one, framing a big tattoo of the Tasmanian Devil in Green Bay Packers garb throttling a Minnesota Viking.
They were told that they could have contracted the virus from kissing their daughter's boo-boo. Tammy Kautzer also may have gotten it from an open cat scratch on her hand.
During the explanation of the events, Schyan interrupted to provide an inventory of the menagerie kept at the home, off a ribbon of dirt road in dairy country, on the eastern edge of an Old Order Mennonite community.
"I got horses and donkeys and goats and puppies and cats," she said.
They got the prairie dogs from a vendor at a Mother's Day event in Wausau. In all, they have about 30 animals now. Tammy Kautzer sells some of the animals she raises and was doing so at the swap meet, she said.
She is the big pet lover. "I don't remember a time in my life when I didn't have a pet," she said.
Her husband seemed a bit ambivalent. "I won't say I hate animals," he said with an easy smile.
Tammy Kautzer said she had owned three prairie dogs about five years ago, about the time they bought the farm. They were friendly critters - one would roll over on his back and wait for his stomach to be scratched. So when she bought two for $95 apiece, she had no reason to suspect they would be ornery - or infected by another exotic animal, she said.
"I thought they were captive raised," she said. She later was told that they actually were captured somewhere in the Dakotas three weeks before.
"I didn't know that they had been sucked out of the ground," she said.
Where the animals came from is a matter of dispute.
At one point Monday, Tammy Kautzer was on the phone with the husband of the seller, who was angry that she had been identified in print by Kautzer and had threatened to sue. The husband was calling to smooth things over.
The Kautzers said they weren't worried about getting sick again. Neither are the agencies they've spoken with, they said.
Besides burning the bedding of the prairie dog that lived and minding their scabs as they fall off, all they can do is wait.
"They told us that it's the pox," Tammy Kautzer said, with a self-conscious laugh. "Once we have it, we're immune to it. I hope so. Because once you have it, it's a nasty little circle."
Well in my post above there is a 3 year old kid and her 28 year old mother who had/has monkeypox and surely they are doing fine! (This kid and her mother are too young to have been vacinated for any type of pox)
This goes to show that monkeypox would not be very effective as a bio-terrorism threat in this country, 30+ people are believed to have it now and no one has died or even have come close to death due to it.
Yep, but it doesn't stop the multiple postings of obviously skewed numbers from African outbreaks. Those postings should at minimum come with a disclaimer. Otherwise it's nothing less sensationalistic (is that a word?)than what the media is guilty of.
These people are truly morons and and embarrassment to the people of Wisconsin.
MY posts are very accurate. I cite my sources and give the background, and make things very clear. You just don't like FACTS, without slanting them according to your agenda, which, as others observed as well, seems to be to disrupt a discussion of information exchange about this topic.
Tommy Thompson was just live on Neil Cavuto on FOX.
Tommy said gov can find no causal relationship between monkeypox and SARS and whatever to terrorism.
May I say again I want him gone, just like Ridge will soon be!
Tommy Thompson was also the guy who told us about Bob Stevens drinking from a North Carolina stream at the time of the anthrax.
