What Diseases Can Carpet Fleas Cause?

As I brought up earlier about behavior of carpet fleas, they are the chinches of pets, farm animals and human beings. These are laterally flattened and flightless insects. Carpet fleas can move rapidly through jumping, using their legs and a spring-like mechanism in the bodies. They are capable of spectacular leaps, covering distances adequate to one hundred times their bodies length.

Carpet fleas will feed upon humans and attacks come when the fleas are denied access to their normal host. Humans are most at risk from being bitten by fleas while removing infested pests from the home such as mice or or rats or birds in the roofing. Humans are generally bitten around the ankles and on the lower legs. Skin can become itchy, inflamed and swollen. Skin irritations are caused  by flea spittle injected into the body during the feeding process to keep the blood coagulating. Infections may grow whenever the bites are itched, even worse, fleas could send parasites and serious diseases to pets and humans. The deadliest disease that can be spread by a flea is the plague.

Plague is a disease from rodents that can be passed on to humans and other animals infected by fleas. In humans, the plague has 3 forms:

· Bubonic plague causes the lymph glands infection 

· Septicemia plague causes an infection of the blood

· Pneumonic plague causes an infection of the lungs

Pneumonic plague is the most infectious variety because it can be spread from one individual to another in airborne droplets.

The plague is potentially a critical disease caused by an infection of the bacteria known as Yersenia Pestis. The term plague has great historical importance including three major pandemics such as the devastating black plague (Black  Death) of the Middle Ages. Since its establishment in the United States at the turn of the century, plague has been a continual concern in California, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. In the world, there are a thousand or more cases reported each year. In the eighties an epidemic plague occurred annually in Africa, Asia, or South America.

The septicemia and bubonic plague were transferred from direct contact with a infected fleas carrying the plague disease, while the pneumonic plague was transferred through airborne droplets of saliva coughed out by bubonic or septicemia infected people.

Domestic cats and dogs are readily infected by carpet fleas or from eating contaminated wild rodents. Infected cats and dogs may serve as the root cause of an infection to persons exposed to them. Animals could also bring plague-infected fleas into the home.

When a person is bitten from an infected flea or infected by handling an infected animal, the plague bacteria moves through the bloodstream to the lymph nodes. The lymph nodes swell, forming the painful lumps ("buboes") that are features of bubonic plague. Additional symptoms are fever, headache, chills, and extreme fatigue. Some people may also have gastrointestinal symptoms.

If bubonic plague stays untreated, then the bacteria can breed in the bloodstream and cause plague septicemia, life-threatening blood infection. Signs and symptoms are fever, chills, fatigue, abdominal pains, shock, and bleeding  into the skin of other organs. Left untreated septicemia (blood poisoning) plague is generally fatal.

Pneumonic plague, or plague pneumonia, produced when the bacteria infects the lungs. People who are infected by plague pneumonia experience high fever, chills, difficulty breathing, coughing, and bloody phlegm. Plague pneumonia is considered as a real health emergency since a cough can spread the disease to other people quickly. Left untreated pneumonic plague is usually fatal.