vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #147 / Social life / Reading article...

Cuts in city funding to exterminate rats have caused an explosion of the disease-bearing pests in homes, schools and hospitals this year.

The number of rats has swelled by an estimated 40 percent since spring, and health and vector control officials are worried that cold weather in the fall will drive the creatures indoors from the bushes, garbage piles and sewers where they make their summer homes.

At City Clinical Hospital in Second River, parents have complained about rats in children's wards, said Dr. Valentina Voronok, deputy chief of the city's epidemiological station.

"Parents out there have seen rodents, and rats have attacked children, too," Voronok said. With the boom in the rat population, the city has seen a 100 percent increase in rat-borne diseases such as scarlet-like fever, said Dr. Ekaterina Zaitseva, chief physician at the State Committee of Sanitary Epidemic Supervision in the Municipal Disinfection Station.

Likewise, hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, an illness associated with rats, is on the increase, Voronok said. In the first six months of the year, there were 23 cases; in the past six weeks, seven more people have contracted the disease.

Extermination officials reported last spring that pulmonary plague had been detected in the Port of Vladivostok. They said the disease - which wiped out millions in medieval Europe - on black rats in ships coming from China and southeast Asia. (Local gray rats are less suceptible.)

But Dr. Gennady Murnachyov, head of the city's anti-plague laboratory, said no one has found any plague-infected rats in the port or elsewhere in the area.

"There are no plague-infected rats in town," Murnachyov said flatly.

If there had been any plague, black rats would have died off in large numbers, said Georgy Trofimchuk, a zoologist with the anti-plague lab. But there was no dieback of the population.

The city has all the means necessary to control infections requiring quarrantine, such as plague, cholera and yellow fever, Murnachyov said.

But that doesn't mean officials are insouciant about the risk of plague. "We have all the conditions (for it to spread)," Zaitseva said.

With the larger rat population, more people are being bitten. In the first six months of this year, the city's clinics and hospitals treated 12 people for rat bites, Voronok said. In July alone, another six people sought treatment for bites.

One needn't be bitten, however, to contract a rat-borne illnesses. Many diseases associated with rats can be transmitted through feces left in halls and stairwells where humans walk. Infected people can spread plague through the air, like the flu.

The city contracts with the State Committee of Sanitary Epidemic Supervision for rodent control, and at least 1.6 billion rubles ($280,701) are needed to clean out the rats in schools, city-owned housing and hospitals, said Zaitseva. Yet the city only provided 110 million rubles ($19,298), and that came only after a letter of complaint from T.I. Vershkova, the city's chief sanitary physician. The treatment should clean out the buildings for two months.

Zaitseva said rats hadn't been exterminated in medical buildings and city-owned apartments since December. Schools haven't been cleared of rats since June 1996.

The funds will pay for extermination in some of the worst rat-infested sites. These include five maternity wards, 30 schools and day care facilities, nine hospitals and clinics, scores of apartment buildings, and the city's anti-plague laboratory.

A spokeswoman in the city press center said Mayor Victor Cherepkov has copies of a law proving that rat extermination should be funded from the federal budget, not the city's. The woman declined to be quoted by name, saying she didn't want to assume responsibility for the issue.

A rat couple can have up to 1,000 offspring, Vershkova warned in her letter.

Added Voronok, "I hope a disaster won't happen because of the rats."