Bubonic Plague.
And if that's not bad enough,
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/heal ... 781304.htm
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Infectious diseases carried by rats may be a human health time-bomb, researchers warned an international conference in Canberra.
Scientists from 39 countries attending the second International Rodent Biology and Management Conference heard that rats were already known to carry nearly 70 diseases, but there were fears they could harbour many more.
With a nearly four million rats born every day, or 10 for every human alive, the much-loathed rodents could spread more disease through towns and cities in developing nations.
"Rats are a reservoir of disease, the sleeping giants of disease in the world," said Dr Lyn Hinds of CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, a specisalist division of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation.
"It is more likely than ever that we will have greater levels of debilitating diseases caused by rats ... with the increased density of human populations," she told delegates.
Although rats have plagued city-dwellers and farmers for centuries, researchers have yet to find an efficient way to stop them spreading disease or ruining crops. A staggering 3.6 million rats are born every day, although many don't live for longer than a few months.
Besides harbouring typhus and the bubonic plague, rats are also known to carry diseases such as leptospirosis, a potentially serious bacterial illness spread by their urine contaminating water or food.
Hinds said 6,000 cases of leptospirosis were diagnosed in Thailand alone in 2000, killing 350 people, but researchers say many more deaths should have been attributed to rats but were classified as unknown fever.
Farmers in Asia have long struggled to protect their crops from rats and continue to test a variety of traps and other methods of keeping rodent populations down.
But they do have their uses. Every year, an estimated 35 million rats are bought and sold in markets along Asia's Mekong river. Gutted and cooked over a charcoal grill, roast rat is considered a delicacy in many parts of the region.
"Ricefield rats are both an important source of protein and a significant avenue of income for many farmers," Dr Kong Luen Heong of the Manila-based International Rice Research Institute, in the Philippines, told delegates.
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Of course, in CranberryWorld there wouldn't be any disease. Here in the real world though there are real problems to cope with.
"It might be a bit better to tune to one of my fiddle's open strings, like A, rather than asking me for an F#." - Martin Milner
:roll: Ughh!
