Ireland’s Health Services (HSE) has been criticised for trapping and euthanising feral cats which were identified as being a source of a recent flea outbreak at University Hospital Galway (a hospital for people).
This is an interesting little story but it is not a current story, I would like to add. I think it dates from 2013.
Apparently, a number of staff working at the hospital in the outpatient department had been bitten by fleas over a period of weeks. The natural question to ask was where did these fleas come from?
That’s an interesting question because one immediately presumes that these were cat fleas or at least management appear to have presumed that and from that starting point I suppose somebody in authority at the hospital decided that the only source of cat fleas were the feral cats, which I also presume were somewhere near the hospital feeding on waste supplied by the hospital.
The hospital management employed a pest control company to remove the feral cats from the hospital grounds. It was reported that the cats were subsequently taken to a veterinarian to be humanely put down or relocated. It was also stated that some were rehoused, if possible. I doubt whether that was possible!
Concerned people were highly critical of the behaviour of the hospital in putting down feral cats. A spokesman for Galway Cat Rescue stated that it was almost impossible that the feral cats were responsible for the outbreak of fleas for the simple reason that feral cats are frightened of people and steer clear of them.
Genuine feral cats will steer well clear of people. Not only is the killing of feral cats inhumane under the circumstances, it is ineffective because as soon as some feral cats have been culled others will turn up in their place. In addition, everyone knows that feral cats help to keep rodent populations down and rodent populations are probably a greater hazard to a hospital than the odd feral cat.
It has been suggested that the most likely cause of the infestation of fleas in the outpatients department of the hospital was a person who walked into the hospital with the fleas on his person.
Fleas like to live in the fur of cats because the environment is perfect for a cat flea. However, cat fleas can live on people, perhaps in their clothes. It is certainly quite plausible that a person who went to the outpatients department (a patient or a member of staff) kept cats at his or her home and had failed to ensure that her home was free of cat fleas. Perhaps there was an infestation at her home. Who knows?
It just seems that once again that the feral cat has been made a scapegoat as is often the case.
It wasn’t intended as a joke, just tongue-in-cheek. Over here, we’ve seen university dorms and frat houses, VA housing facilities, even wings of hospitals shut down due to bedbugs in the past few years. Much easier to blame it on a flea infestation caused by some cats, don’t you think? 😉
The problem is with the hospital management who tend to be highly insensitive and a bit stupid! There was a lot of mismanagement of NHS hospitals in England and I presume sometimes in Ireland. It may have been the case that a patient brought the fleas in with him or her when he came to treatment. It may not have been a member of staff and it was almost certainly nothing to do with the feral cats, hence my article.
We don’t have animal hospitals here, either. Unless you consider universities like Cornell and such. 😉
And if this particular Galway hospital, University Galway Hospital, is staffed by university students, residents and doctors, then is it wrong to assume that these energetic individuals with conscience would not have some leverage when it comes to this sort of erroneous reporting? Or is it beyond their scope? Am I simply being naive? The news source on this that you respect the most as being honest?
It seems all too clear, that once again, the majority of human society does not give a damn about our feral cat pop. Thanks for pointing this out.
Is that a joke? If it is it is not bad. 😉
Or maybe they were afraid of bedbugs getting into the newsbite. ?
Yes, that is the argument – the feral cats were too obviously the source of the infestation and the more subtle and perhaps more intelligent argument is that a person walks in with the fleas on him or her.