Posted on May 2, 2022

Rats caused the Black Death. Now a boom in their number is bringing us into contact with new pathogens

Three months ago, rice farmer William Lebango put his three-year-old son, Stuart, to bed and sat eating supper on the porch of the small mud-brick home in central Tanzania he shares with his wife and three children.

Suddenly, from inside, they heard a blood-curdling scream. While Stuart was asleep, a rat had climbed inside his mosquito net and bitten his leg.

‘We ran in and searched for the rat and found it hiding in his bed,’ Lebango recalls, cradling his son and showing his scar from the rat bite. ‘But it escaped before I could kill it.’

Over the ensuing months rats have continued to plague his family. On the almost daily event that Stuart sees one of the rodents scurrying through their house, he runs away in terror and hides, calling for his father to save him.

Lebango’s other sons, aged 16 and 12, have so far escaped being bitten but his wife, Zwena, has been diagnosed with typhus (a rodent-borne disease which if left untreated can have a mortality rate of 60 per cent) while others in the family have been wracked with various mystery fevers suspected to be associated with the rats.

‘It makes me so angry because it never ends,’ Lebango says. ‘Nothing can stop the rats.’

In Glasgow, striking refuse workers recently warned of a ‘modern-day plague’ while in New York rat sightings have rocketed to more than 21,000 over the past year (compared to 15,000 in 2019).

The Parisian authorities have embarked on a policy of dératisation to cope with the city’s worst infestation in several decades, even dynamiting burrows in municipal parks in an attempt to bring its population under control.

A few months ago in London – where the rat population has been estimated as high as two rodents for every person (although scientists baulk at such surveys saying the true number is impossible to judge) – a pair of rats were filmed nibbling on freshly-baked croissants on the bakery counter of a Sainsbury’s branch in Islington.

Original Post: The Plague Rat Invasion Which Threatens the Next Pandemic