vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #166 / Social life / Reading article...

Cuts in city funding to exterminate rats over the past year have caused a 250-percent surge in the disease-bearing pests since last fall, Vladivostok sanitary officials said recently.

Throughout the city, the rat population has increased rapidly in apartment blocks, hospitals and other buildings since October, the last time the city paid for rodent extermination. And with the spread of rats, there has been a growing caseload of rat-related diseases among residents.

“It is getting worse and worse,” said Dr. Yekaterina Zaitseva, chief physician at the State Committee for Sanitary Epidemic Supervision. “The rat population is going to keep increasing until there is an explosion. It will go on until rats are jumping in the streets before anybody kills them.”

Mayor Victor Cherepkov’s office, hit by a cash crisis, canceled funding for rat abatement last spring, and since then there has been only one extermination effort, covering buildings with the highest infection rates. The Mayor’s Office blames the krai administration, for not providing the money. In any event, diseases such as leptospirosis and hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome are on the rise, Zaitseva said.

Hemorrhagic fever is the most widespread disease in the Primorye region rat population. Ninety-six percent of all rats carry the disease. In humans it is fatal in 12 percent to 14 percent of the cases if untreated, said Victoria Ivanis, the regional administration’s chief infection expert. In 1996, 66 people were treated for hemorraghic fever; last year, the number probably doubled. “The situation is very serious,” Ivanis said.

This month, a 35-year-old woman contracted the disease after coming into contact with rat feces in the public hallway of her apartment building, Ivanis said. And the Vladivostok Medical University had to kill all its lab rats because they became infected with hemorrhagic fever and spread the illness to staff.

Even more alarming, rats can potentially carry the danger of plague, said Gennady Murnachyov, head of Vladivostok’s federal anti-plague laboratory. Reports that the city’s rat population is plague-infected are incorrect, Murnachyov said, but the danger is real. Yet the anti-plague laboratory is broke, so it no longer keeps a count of the rat population and has few resources to fight rodent-borne disease.

“Instead of checking for the plague every month, we can only do it twice a year,” he said.