There’s a new thing to blame beavers for and the medical community is leaping to judgement. The flooding,blocked culverts, chewed trees and beaver fever were getting tired and run of the mill. Something new was needed. How about pneumonia and fungal infections?

Fungal Diseases Unique to Certain Areas of the United States

A father and son go on a Boy Scout trip to North Wisconsin that includes several nights at a camp near the Eagle River. The camp has 40 acres of pine and hemlock forest. The camp sees more than 6,000 visitors annually, who participate in all kinds of outdoor activities, including lectures and ecology projects.

After about six or eight weeks of their stay, the son gets fever, a dry cough, and chest pain. It is found that several of the boy’s friends, who are also scouts, are all ill with similar symptoms. On the other hand, a health officer at the Wisconsin Public Health Department is getting an unusual number of case reports of elementary school students visiting their primary care physicians with fever, severe cough, chest pain, and this diagnosis of “walking pneumonia”. Chest x-rays reveal multiple nodular-appearing spots in the lungs.

Eventually, several children were diagnosed with blastomycosis that is commonly found in the drainage area of the Mississippi River valley.

Okay, so your basic boy scout trip turns bad. How does this relate to beavers? Stay tuned for the money paragraph.

Several scout groups were interviewed to locate the source of the blastomycosis, and it was deduced that the most likely exposure was the beaver pond where the ecology was taught.

The closer the children were to the beaver pond, the more likely they were to catch the illness. The relationship of beavers to an outbreak of blastomycosis had not previously been described. Environmental features, such as the chemistry of the soil, air humidity conditions, and the presence of beaver excrement, likely combined in the right formula to allow blastomycosis to flourish.

Really?

REALLY?

So the ecology lesson was taught near the beaver pond. FOR OBVIOUS REASONS. And the kids had so much fun catching frogs or fishing that they stayed NEAR the beaver pond. FOR OBVIOUS REASONS. And some kid caught something and passed it onto the group.

And you just assume its because its of the beaver droppings and moist pond? I asked our friendly physician Rick Lanman about this and he said that

Well that’s an association but does not prove causality. I generally think of blastomycosis as endemic to the Northeast, histoplasmosis to the Midwest, and coccidio mycosis to the Southwest, including the CA Central Valley. Their theory is beaver excrement is rich in nutrients like bird and bat excrement. I think that’s unlikely since beavers are herbivores.

Now just how rich are beaver droppings you ask? That depends. Would you consider saw dust rich?