~rise up oh dead topic!~

I was wondering the same thing as the OP about POM and rodents. I've stopped my in-house rodent breeding for a time to re-think/organize how I want to do it. Anyway I've started buying rodents from a women who runs a pet store. At first things went pretty good and the animals looked healthy but the last couple times not so good. I usually keep the rodents for a week or so especially this time because they where just not clean. I keep them in tubs and give them as much food/water as they want. This last batch of mice is looking even better visually over night.

Backup to yesterday...being that I'm not a bit nervous with the quality of the live rodents (they are fed pre-killed) I wondered if I could treat their fresh bedding with POM so I did some searching. I found this on Ralph Davis's website in the first page of search hits:

Lately all I use is POM for mites..........it works every time...........I had a bad experience with lice in my rodent collection a while back..........nothing I did would get rid of the rat lice............and the vets and professionals I spoke to said that the lice were really not a problem..........they were species specific.............and that they would just live on the rats...........they would not hurt me or my snakes.

Well I hated the fact that their were lice around............even though they are not easy to see.............you just know that they are there and that bugged me.............anyway...........BK did not work at all.................so I called Bob Pound............he said to use the POM in the bedding...........or to spray the POM on cotton balls and let the rodents bed in it..........

I chose to just spray it in the bedding...............We did this once a week for a month.............not only did the POM kill the lice................but it killed every bug that even came close to the rat room..........there were dead flies, moths, worms, spiders.............you name it ..............everything was dead!!
In that last line "everything" does NOT include the rodents he was treating.

Reading this was enough to convince me...I have POM in my herp supplies so I treated the bedding. I gave it a lite spray in each tub (rats/mice) I then agitated the bedding to "mix it up" and each tub got some drying time outside.

Already yesterday evening I had a mouse in bad shape I would guess nerve/neurological damage as he was leaning heavily to the side...practically laying over. When attempting movement it was more or less in a circle and could not get to food or water...I took his misery away. I noticed he had some bite/chew marks under the tail close to the base of the spine also.

Now today I have another mouse who is showing similiar signs of leaning over and and while CAN still get to food and water walks in the same cicular pattern but not as bad as the one I found yesterday. This mouse was seperated with easy to reach food and water for observation.

Now I'm worried if its the POM doing this?? Or severe inbreeding which takes pretty deep in-breeding I had thought? OR something related to the conditions at the shop I purchased them from. At this point the other remaining mice are fine. The rat tub was treated in the same manor as I said but I have not seen any of them having issues.

I'm thinking I will dump the bedding to be safe? I've raised mice for years but this one of the few times I have done any sort of "treatment" and the first time with POM. Would it affect them this quickly? One nearly dead in just a few hours and another looking that way the next day? I did not pick the mice nor inspect them aside from putting them into my own containers when I picked them up but that would not have been long enough to see these signs.

Any suggestions, comments, or experiences?