How to disinfect a wood toy

[Rachelt3]

Hi,

I went to pick up a cage today I bought off eBay second hand, and it came with some toys as well, for the cage I'm going to soak it all in a hot bath and use pet safe disinfectant to clean in but there is a wooden bridge that I'm not sure how to disinfect, if I do it the same way as the cage will it be ok?

[Vanilla]

It's usually best to throw out anything wood or paper because you don't know if the previous hamster has had any diseases or anything, and you can't use disinfectant on it as they're porous . If the bridge is small enough, you can immerse it in a pan of boiling water for about 15 minutes to disinfect it (I've seen this method used for cleaning wood from outdoors for cages)

[cypher]

If you have no idea what it might have been exposed to I would bin it.
It's really quite hard to totally clean wood & usually not worth it for something like a wooden bridge.

[herbi7]

Yeah, Chuck it. I recently had a scare when a member drew my attention to the possibility of rodent mites. These are little beggars to get rid of, the eggs don't die even if you boil or freeze them and you have to seal everything right up in a plastic bag after disinfecting for a fortnight as that's how long the eggs take to hatch and then disinfect again before you can be sure there are no living mites left. And even then because they are so tiny they can escape from the tiniest holes so they could still have got out and laid more eggs. Incidentally they can be present on your ham without it knowing and when the numbers of mites get large enough the ham will die of anaemia... Horrible things. Just a warning, if any eggs were present on even plastic toys or cages that you can scrub, they are barely visible to the naked eye and you would have to disinfect really thoroughly to get them off, they stick on like nits but look like the tiniest bits of ordinary dust.