This is not CSI fake reality... you don't run tests with a snap of magic fingers in the space of a 1 hour show. If you are exposed and are among the small percentage to become infected the disease could go one of two ways... you are infected and don't get sick or you are infected and don't begin to show symptoms (usually vague ones at that) until at least 1-2 weeks after infection. In other words, being infected doesn't guarantee you would/will become symptomatic (i.e. physically sick with the meningitis). So it's a waiting game to see if anyone gets sick or not and attempting to run tests on those who might have been exposed but didn't "get sick" to see if they were indeed infected or not. Usually people are not clinically diagnosed with LCMV until almost a month after infection. So if it took a month for the first sick person to get diagnosed and more time to test other people exposed, and more time to track the potential source of infection and more time to confirm the infection source, and more time to track down and contact those that might have received contaminated shipments and more time to find out if they are infected or not and then to initiate decontamination procedures, etc. 3 months is really NOT that long to deal with a situation.
Considering LCMV is an uncommon illness in spite of a notable percentage of the mouse population being carriers and human infection rate is low. Normally when there is an above average cluster infection rate from LCMV it's usually centered around people who work in LABORATORIES on a daily basis with rodents where exposure levels are much HIGHER than the normal human being. The people here who got infected in this incident.. guess what - they were working in a rodent breeding facility and were in direct daily contact with thousands upon thousands of rodents and therefore hyper-exposed to the virus from fresh feces, urine, saliva, and airborne contaminates and even then only a handful got symptomatically sick.
Those who do get sick with LCMV, unless there are some outstanding complications (like compromised immune systems), are rarely going to die. I would say if you had to get infected with a form of meningitis, then a mild form of aseptic meningitis like LCMV is probably the better route to go compared to the really nasty bacterial types or even the viral types you can develop when infected with listeria or west nile.
RP and CDC did what they did, contacted the people that needed to be contacted and took the actions that were deemed necessary to deal with the situation first. Making apologies to everyone else that were not technically affected by the situation came second.
I would say put your time and paranoia into worrying about other more serious illnesses that you can potentially catch far more easily from your reptile pets (directly or indirectly)... diseases with a much higher infection and/or mortality rate such as Salmonella and E coli Campylobacter, Pseudomonas, tuberculosis and don't forget various protozoans, ticks, and fungi and lord knows what else that is out there.
