My neighbor was a maintenance man at an apartment complex and was bitten while emptying mouse traps. He was infected with a virus that caused some kind of lymphatic disease that developed into viral meningitis. He wound up spending months in hospitals and rehab and has permanent brain damage and disability. It was treatable if he had gone to the Dr earlier but healthcare is expensive and hard to access so he decided to wait and see if it'd pass.

Ditto for all animals. A guy from out of town was here for work one time and he tried to pet a cute stray cat he saw hanging out next door. I ended up being the designated local chaperone to take him and his dumb purple sausage finger to the hospital at 2 AM that night.

Mice have been known to spread plague even in recent times, for example. Fortunately, it's treatable with antibiotics.

What do you mean checked out? The only checking out you can get for a rat bite is wound care and a rabies shot. Sometimes antibiotics depending on the wound (not because rat, but because bite).

There was a case of a rabid fox coming through the channel tunnel. Caught though.