I have not shared this with alot of people but its not a topic that comes up much, so I thought i would share my experince and scare with salmonella and my daughter.

In the summer of 97 I was really into reptiles and already owned many different species of reptiles including Iguanas, savanah monitors, pythons, boas, kingsnakes, rodents to feed these, and at the time my favorite thing was bearded dragons. I knew a local breeder that produced some beardeds and I got to pick out several nice ones.
As my life progressed and my love for reptiles progressed, I found myself 4 years later in 2001 to have a baby girl and at the same time several adult bearded dragons. I loved my dragons and had a huge cage in our living room for them. They were often picked up and let roam around in the room for short periods and ofter kept in close proximity to our young child and her play area. I had no idea what i was doing was possibly harmful to my daughter in anyway. I love my children more than words can express and I will never forget what happened and will never make these mistakes again.
Mid summer that year my daughter became sick and being small and her first real sickness set in and of course being my first child, I was worried sick. Things only got worse over the next 24 hours and the next day she had a loose stool that made us decide to call the doctor. Her stool had blood in it. We immediately took her in to have tested to find out what was wrong. After some rehydration and some blood work and cultures done of her stool, the doctors called us and told us our daughter had Salmonella. Tests were then done on my animals feces to dtermine if the strains of salmonella were the same,and they ended up to be. It did not make the news, but there were students from teh local University that came and did a paper for his final on my animals and the way it transfered the salmonella to my daughter.


Since then, I have been very carefull to always use good sanitation practices as well as lots of hand sanitizing gel. Its a very rare thing for animals to give humans salmonella but it IS POSSIBLE and is very scary and can be very bad if not caught in time.

Mark

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