Pet snakes and babies don't mix: 4-month-old hospitalized with Salmonella in UK
I don’t know what it is with parents in the U.K. letting pet snakes hang out with their babies.
For the third time in recent memory, a 4-month-old baby fell seriously ill with salmonella she caught from the family’s pet snake.
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The baby girl was admitted to intensive care at St Thomas Hospital with a fever and high heart rate in August, where hospital tests revealed she was suffering from a strain known as salmonella Arizona, which is commonly associated with snakes.
She has recovered since then and an investigation by environmental health officers at Sutton Council identified the most likely source to be the family’s two royal python snakes, which can carry the infection in their gut and spread it through their droppings.
The council has now issued a hygiene warning to owners of exotic reptiles, saying it is essential for them to wash hands thoroughly after handling a reptile and keep the animal away from anywhere food is prepared.
Company says snakehead was planted in T.G.I. Friday's meal
T.G.I. Friday said a severed snake head found in a dish of broccoli at one of its upstate New York restaurants was likely planted in the meal.
The Carrollton, Texas, company says Friday it asked the New York State Police to open a criminal investigation into product tampering. Spokeswoman Amy Freshwater said the snakehead was sent for testing at an independent laboratory that confirmed it had never been cooked and was added to the cooked broccoli.
Enough is enough: I've had it with this mofo snakes on this mofo plane
Samuel L. Jackson would be proud of Australia’s Qantas airlines after four pythons escaped from their carrier and became snakes on a plane.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports the plane was grounded and fumigated after the snakes could not be found.
Native to the arid and rocky parts of western and central Australia, the Stimson's python eats its prey whole — and this includes small mammals, birds, frogs and other reptiles.
Baby gets salmonella from snake
Amanda Vry found out from research on the Internet that her daughter Gabriella could have contracted Salmonella from reptiles and is now looking for a new home for Reg, a Colombian Rainbow Boa.
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Reg was bought as a present for her son's ninth birthday and the family carried out research on keeping reptiles beforehand as Ms Vry was heavily pregnant at the time.Apparently they didn't use the Salmonella search term, and it's unlikely most purveyors of reptilian pets talk about the Salmonella issue.
Ms Vry told BBC News,
"When they said it was salmonella I just did not know how she could have caught it. I went to the hospital's information centre and typed in 'salmonella' and it said it can be caught quite easily from reptiles. We were all shocked after we had carried out the research before. If I had been given this information before we bought it, we would never have bought it and my daughter would never have been ill and my family would not have gone through this."
As Samuel L. would say, "Get those mother***ing snakes away from those mother***ing babies."
Snake on a plane
Associated Press is reporting that physician Dr. Ed Carruth, flying himself across Mississippi in a one-seat plane, discovered a stowaway gray rat snake when it began ''licking'' his arm Thursday.''I've been flying planes for 50 years and over 14,000 hours, and this is the most unusual in-flight emergency I've encountered. I guess it wasn't exactly an emergency, but I did almost hurt myself when I saw it. … Idid some aerobatics. And once he got oriented, he went to the back of the plane."
The story says that when Carruth arrived at Brookhaven Municipal Airport after his flight from Meridian, officials called snake expert Joey Pradillo to remove the reptile and released it into the wild.
