Keeping Rodents Out Of Your Columbia, SC Home

Each of these rodents carries different risks and may show different signs. For example, a rock squirrel may devastate a garden, sprinkler system, or yard, while a roof rat may gnaw holes in brick to make their passage easier. Out of this selection of rodents, you can expect signs like these:

• Droppings, especially around opened food packages
• Shredded paper, insulation, fabric, or grass as nesting material
• Food packages that have been chewed through
• Gnawing or holes in walls, wood, or floors
• Greasy rub marks along pathways or around holes
• Scratching sounds in walls or ceiling
• A musty or foul odor
• Seeing a mouse, rat, or many more squirrels than usual

Rodents are persistent chewers that can make a way there is no way, causing damage to your property, putting your home at risk of electrical issues and fire, and jeopardizing your health.

Can Rodents In Your Columbia House Make You Sick?

Domestic rodents, including the ones that are mostly outdoor nuisances, carry a wide selection of dangerous diseases, including a few deadly ones. While the house mouse can transmit food-borne diseases like salmonella and lymphocytic choriomeningitis (LCM), the deer mouse is a carrier of the deadly hantavirus, which has a 38% mortality rate and manifests as a pulmonary illness similar to pneumonia. Hantavirus is spread through dried urine that becomes airborne, and so it is especially dangerous to enter into an infested area to try to clean or exterminate by yourself.

Roof rats carry a great number of dangerous diseases, but they can also bring plague-carrying fleas and other parasites into your home. Some of the diseases roof rats can transmit include jaundice, typhus, rat-bite fever, trichinosis, as well as food-borne diseases like salmonella. 
While less likely to contact humans, rock squirrels may scale rock walls to make their residence near or inside human habitations. They are carriers of tularemia and plague.

All of these rodents are significant health and safety threats, whether through the destruction they can cause to make their burrows, the diseases they carry, the ticks and fleas they bring indoors, or through their ability to worsen allergies and asthma. It’s well worth the time and effort to protect your home against rodents.