Talking Health with the Clinton County Health Department

Springtime gives people baby fever, and I’m not talking about the human variety – I’m talking animal babies. Raccoons, chipmunks, squirrels, skunks, and foxes (oh my!). Every year CCHD receives numerous calls from residents who have encountered baby or injured wild animals and want to help. Though intentions are good, doing this increases your risk of rabies exposure. You don’t have to be bitten by an animal to be exposed; it can also happen when the animal’s saliva gets into an open cut, your eyes, nose or mouth. I will admit, they are cute, but when you encounter a wild animal (even if it is sick or injured) the best thing you can do is contact a DEC Wildlife Professional . Don’t touch them, treat them, or give them mouth to mouth (true story). To tell us more about keeping our family safe from the rabies virus , we chatted with Amanda Masten. Amanda is a Senior Public Health Sanitarian in the Environmental Health & Safety Division at CCHD. She has been in charge of coordinating

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have probably heard that the North Country is Tick Country . Actually, you could probably throw a rock at most parks and trails in our area and hit a tick. The ‘ticky’ (see what I did there) part of housing so many tiny visitors in our community is that many come with disease that can make you really sick. In fact, the number of reported tick-related illnesses in Clinton County has more than tripled in the past five years. So what can we do to protect ourselves? This month we are ‘ticking’ (oops, I did it again) the brain of Dr. Lee Ann Sporn, a professor at Paul Smith’s College. Her research focuses on monitoring and surveillance for ticks and the diseases they carry in the North Country. Dr. Sporn, it seems like we hear more about ticks than we did when I was growing up. Is that because there are more of them or we are just talking about them more? It used to be said that “there are no ticks, poison ivy or rattlesnakes in the Adirondack