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Default She had been killed by an electric shock caused by a rat that hadchewed through the power cables leading to her bathroom.

Deadly rat plague riles Tokyo residents

A warm glow starts to sweep through a small pub in the Kabukicho
entertainment district in Tokyo as patrons get drunker and fill their
bellies.

Suddenly, as if from out of nowhere, a whopping rat about 15 centimeters
long drops from the ceiling onto a table covered with delicacies and
drink. The rodent idly raises its head and almost leers at the startled
restaurant-goers before jumping to the floor and scampering off.

Oh rats! The pleasant atmosphere seeping through the eatery just moments
earlier is destroyed.

Vile vermin are infesting the streets of Tokyo -- and, worse than the
gross incident at the Kabukicho pub, they can have deadly results,
according to Shukan Asahi (3/17).

Late last month, a 73-year-old pensioner was found dead in her bath.

She had been killed by an electric shock caused by a rat that had chewed
through the power cables leading to her bathroom.

Rats are responsible for 10 similar incidents a year in the capital
alone, while also causing around 40 electrical problems that don't end
up in fires.

Aiding the vermin has been Japan's record cold winter, which has driven
the rodents to seek warmth indoors or in hollows between buildings, and
has sparked an increase in black rats of plague-like proportions.

"Skyscrapers and insulated wooden houses are the ideal homes for black
rats," Chikara Tanigawa, president of the Ikari Sterilization
Laboratory, tells Shukan Asahi. "Black rats are originally from warm,
southern climes. In the cold spell that we've been going through, all
the rats that had been outside would be doing their darnedest to get
indoors."

A restaurant industry worker is also being riled by the rodents.

"Nibbling away at food in the pantry and droppings under cupboards, I
can handle," the worker tells Shukan Asahi. "It's when the rats pop up
in front of the customers that really causes trouble. It drives people
away."

The rising rat population is compounded by the strict Pharmaceutical
Affairs Law, which bans the use of rat poison, meaning the only way the
potentially deadly creatures can be caught is by using such means as
traps and adhesive sheets, on which the vermin get stuck and die of
starvation.

And recent trends among the pests are doing little to help, either, as
black rats become proportionately more common than their sewer rat
cousins, who once dominated the Tokyo vermin landscape. Black rats,
which can move vertically and horizontally, are also more in your face
than the sewer rats, which travel only along the ground.

"Looking back at the postwar history of rat proliferation in Tokyo,
there is a definite trend where the increase in skyscrapers has caused a
reduction in the number of sewer rats and rise in the number of black
rats," Tanigawa tells Shukan Asahi. "Black rats are scary because they
can cause diseases like Type E pneumonia, and they work together with
household dust mites. The number of household dust mite extermination
cases I dealt with in the 10 years from 1996 to 2005 increased about
ten-fold. If mites bite you, it gets all itchy and you'll end up
scratching for about a week." (By Ryann Connell)

March 9, 2006
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Default She had been killed by an electric shock caused by a rat that had chewed through the power cables leading to her bathroom.

UPDATED: 10:00, April 01, 2006
Hungry rats caused more damage last year
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Damage caused by wild rats to parts of China is worsening, with more
affected areas reported, according to the State Forestry Administration
(SFA).

Wild rats were reported to have caused damage to 1.2 million hectares
of woodlands by the end of 2005, up 26 per cent on the previous year,
said Wu Jian, chief engineer of the SFA's department of afforestation.

The affected area has now spread to 1.4 million hectares in 2006,
according to a joint survey by three government agencies.

The SFA will hold a conference next month to seek solutions to the
issue and to find ways to prevent damage and curb the possible spread
of rat-borne plague.

"This year, we have to do more to prevent plague as the disease is
likely to spread to more areas with the operation of the Qinghai-Tibet
Railway, which will begin its trial passenger runs this July," Wu said.

Northwest China's Qinghai Province is a known plague area; the disease
usually spreads via wild marmots carrying the disease bacterium.

In Qinghai, victims usually become infected by plague while hunting
wild marmots. Its spread from human to human is well controlled in this
area at present, as there is a lack of access to rail services linking
the remote areas of the province to other provinces.

In the past, authorities have been able to contain the spread of plague
by limiting movement of the victims; however, controlling an epidemic
situation may prove more difficult when the Qinghai-Tibet Railway
begins operation.

The disease can be contracted through breathing in airborne particles
and through close contact with infected rodents.

Anyone carrying the plague may infect other train passengers and spread
the disease by travelling further on a train.

"If so, more people will be endangered," Wu said.

Source: China Daily

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