What is Leptospirosis?
Leptospirosis or more commonly known as Weil’s disease is a dangerous water-borne illness which is spread by animal urine that has contaminated lakes or rivers, the usual carriers of this disease are rats but other rodents and small mammals can also spread the disease.
Leptospirosis is often transmitted by the contaminated water after entering the body from open cuts or partially unhealed cuts or can also enter from the mouth or eyes!
Leptospirosis has what’s called an incubation period where it is the time between infection and when the symptoms begin, the symptoms usually appear between 2-3weeks, the symptoms of Leptospirosis is often flu like and patients can also suffer from jaundice, however though Leptospirosis in an full blown infection is quite rare but a milder form of the disease can be quite common.
What do we do wrong?
Sadly we as anglers do many things without thought that increase the chances of being susceptible to the disease like putting Boilie stops into our mouths, or mixing up ground bait without washing our hands afterwards, washing our gear especially cooking gear with lake water; I’m sure all of us have put the beers into the margins in summer to cool off, there are things we can all do to stop the spread like bring water proof plasters, always wear some type of footwear and if every angler picked up the rubbish during the session then there would be a lot less rats to spread the disease small things like these can make a big difference, think about it.
