The Rat Czar
An analysis of data published by the WHO (World Health Organization) shows that the six countries that currently (2013-2018) have the highest number of cases of Bubonic Plague are Madagascar, Tanzania, Congo, Uganda, Peru and, surprisingly, the United States.
These statistics bring into focus small news items published by the American media recently. Although Arizona and New Mexico are the two American states with the highest number of plague cases, and the California coast has taken the honorable third place in this ranking, it is in New York that we will understand how difficult this problem has been to combat.
Given that rats are the vectors in the transmission of bubonic plague, New York has declared war against its infestation by these animals. The situation is so serious that it has already become a joke: a local tourist company offers guided tours so that customers can learn about the favorite places and habits of these nocturnal animals. In addition, a video showing a rat dragging a slice of pizza down the steps of the city's subway went viral on the internet.
When we look at the fertility of rats, the difficulty of combating rat infestations becomes easier to understand. A female rat becomes sexually mature at three months, has 6 to 12 pups per litter and can conceive up to seven times a year. So, if we took a couple of rats to breed, at the end of a year we could have up to 15,000 rats! What's worse, they are not at all fussy about the quality of the food they eat in order to grow and multiply.
What's more, the spread of rats is greatly facilitated by their physical abilities. In their search for food and shelter, the rats climb up smooth walls, swim through sewage pipes and emerge from toilets, can squeeze through holes the size of a coin, or even make holes in wood, plaster and concrete walls.
The New York media reports that the infestation has become even worse since the pandemic. When restaurants had to close at their worst, the rats were deprived of their nightly feasts, provided by garbage bags full of leftover food placed on the sidewalk waiting for the street cleaning trucks to pass by. Starving, the rats were forced to migrate to new neighborhoods in search of food, so that today the infestation affects an even larger area of the city.
In the fight against what the mayor of New York considers “the city's number one public enemy”, he appointed a Municipal Rodent Mitigation Director, whom he promptly nicknamed the “Rat Czar”.
On the creation of this new directorate, the president of the New York City Department of Sanitation told the newspapers that “the mayor had just made it clear that it wasn't the rats who ruled the city”. You might think this sounds like a Gotham City story, but it's not.