The place where I grew up, an old farmhouse in poor repair, was overrun with mice. The mice, of course, got into the food in the cupboard and whatever was left out on the counter or table. At one time I didn't have a bed but slept on a mattress on the floor beside a closet where I could hear mice scampering, and I was afraid the mice would run across me while I was asleep.
When I was a child, seven or eight, I rescued a mouse from a cat, and that ungrateful mouse bit me. I remember also finding nests of baby mice and handling them.
After a shed beside the house was torn down, the rats which had lived in the shed attempted to move into the house. One successfully gnawed through a closet wall and ran into the living room. But I think I was grown up and living somewhere else and just heard about this episode from my parents.
My siblings and cousins and I spent hours playing in barns, where we certainly would've had constant exposure to rodent urine and feces in hay and straw and animal feed.
Both of my parents grew up on farms and would've had this same exposure.
I don't think, however, that I became ill from contact with rodents (if that is what the poll is trying to determine). I have evidence that my mother was ill from about age 12. She missed so much school that she had to repeat the grade. Thereafter she had trouble staying awake. When I finally admitted in my late twenties that I must have the same illness, I just assumed that she had given me a pathogen or that we both had some genetic abnormality.
