Super-Rat A World Threat

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32304, 23 May 1970, Page 5

Super-Rat A World Threat

Scientists all over the World are uniting to fight what could well become a major menace to mankind—the super-rats.

They are rats which resist normal poisons and have become immune to the most powerful ones. In Britain alone they are costing £6O million a year in damage to food and property, and are fast becoming a serious health hazard.

“It is suspected that there has been a genetic change in the rats, that some mutation has occurred,” said the Welsh Department of the Ministry of Agriculture in a recent chilling statement. “It is' Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest: an animal adapting itself to these hazards. But the number of organic compounds that can be made is almost infinite. And we are always hopeful.’! One of the largest concentrations of super-rats is in mid-Wales. where they are gradually breaking through a three-mile control cordon set up to pen them in. The rats have become .immune to Warfarin, the anti-coagulant poison that is in most common use.

And when Ministry scientists discovered the fact, they set up a 1,000 square-mile area ringed with concentrated doses of zinc phosphide in 1967. Since then the superrats have been on the march towards the south of England. Two years ago, a new poison, Racumin 57, killed 800 rats on one rubbish dump. But then scientists found the rats have built up a resistance to this killer, too, and are now spreading at the rate of a mile a year. Research workers say they are hampered because many of the poisons they produce are dangerous to children and other animal life. One group of farmers declared war on the local rat population last year and killed 65,000 rats with cyanide powder, yet officials admit that the victory was only a respite in “what is almost a losing battle.”

They point out that rats breed so fast that a pair could multiply to more than 1.000 within a year.

Paris Battle

Paris launched “the greatest battle against rats ever undertaken” just a year ago. It was fought below and above ground. in 680 inhabited buildings, hundreds of offices and public buildings, and in drains and underground railways. The extermination campaign was put into action after the transfer of Paris's Les Halles market to another site nine miles southeast of the city. In the battle, nearly 20,0001 b of rat poison was laid, and countless numbers of rodents perished. But within weeks new generations of rats had sprung up. And the situation was as bad as it was before the campaign. The Indonesian island of Lombok was also faced with attack by giant rats last year. They attacked babies and old people, and killed off dogs sent to fight them. In 1966, 25,000 people starved to death on the island after similar waves of rats ravaged the countryside This time the authorities employed a novel method of ridding themselves of the plague. They caught two “king rats,” starved them, trained them to attack' the others.

“They will be released to invade the rats' nests and destroy the young,” said Lombok’s governor.

Electronic Piper

In Britain a Pied Piper method was used to attack rats: an electronic device producing a high-pitched noise inaudible to the human ear.

The device, resembling a transistor radio with a long aerial, was switched on experimentally in a field. And after a few minutes, a dozen rats bolted from a nearby slaughterhouse. For a week afterwards “dopey” rats kept coming into the slaughterhouse—and were caught and killed by dogs. The noise was believed to induce a type of nervous breakdown in rats, causing them to bolt from their haunts.

But, in the long run, scientists know that only more and more effective poisons will win the battld against the rats. And they are working all-out to find them before the rat menace becomes any worse. But while they work on ways to exterminate the rats, another danger has quietly emerged: the supermice. These, too, are becoming resistant to poison. And scientists at Britain's Ministry of Agriculture reported: “The search for a first-class mouse-killer is now a major part of our research.” But a small town of Casterton, Victoria, ip Australia, really learned what the super-mice could do last summer. There the rodents were so audacious that they even walked away with some of the traps that had been baited to catch themCopyright Provincial Press Features.

Women’s Talents “Talent is very short. Half the world is made up of women. If we waste women’s talents then we are wasting half the world’s talents.”— Mrs Margery Hurst, founder of an employment agency, interviewed in 8.8. C. programme “Business and Industry.”