Ronny is finally getting back to his feet after a nasty
run-in with pigeon droppings that saw him hospitialised,
close to death's door and off work for nearly two months.
Ronny is a plumber and sprinkler fitter. He
was working installing mains and rangers for the sprinklers
on a job.
It was an old building where demolition work
had been done. The windows had been pulled out and the pigeons
had moved in. As Ronny says "There was bird crap all
over the place". But, unaware of all the danger, this
didn't worry him.
"Nobody wanted to disturb the pigeons.
You know a lot of them were sitting on their eggs, but I
found out these pigeons are like rats with the diseases
they carry. I felt crook on Saturday, on Monday I went to
the doctor. He thought I had some virus. By the following
Sunday I was out of my mind. My wife rang a local doctor
and they called an ambulance. I had pneumonia; I thought
I was dying. They put me on oxygen, took all sorts of tests
and x-rays and originally thought I had Legionella. I was
in hospital for 1 week."
"The blood tests showed that it was caused
by something in my blood. They asked my if I was a bird
handler. I told them I came into contact with some pigeons
on one of my jobs. Eventually it turned out to be something
called psittacosis, which is an air-born disease caused
by bird droppings. The doctor said it would take about 3
months to get over it fully."
They sent investigators out to the work site
and shut it down until the droppings were cleared away.
