Do authorities realize how serious it is? It can be such a bad epidemic enough to wipe out entire population of the town if not curbed rightaway.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/03/pakistani-citys-rat-nightmare-shows-no-sign-of-ending/
WorldViews
Pakistani city’s rat nightmare shows no sign of ending
By Tim Craig May 3
https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_908w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2016/04/04/Foreign/Images/Mian_Khursheed_-__MG_57711459808432.jpg&w=1484
A man holds a dead rat at the main garbage dump in the city of Peshawar on April 2. (Mian Khursheed for The Washington Post)
Man, these rats can really bite.
A public health crisis in one of Pakistan’s largest cities shows no sign of subsiding as “killer rats” continue their rampage, biting more than 400 people over the past month, officials at Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar said Tuesday.
In early April, The Washington Post reported how Peshawar was gripped with fear amid reports that supersize rats had infested the city, killing at least eight children over the past year.
The story read like a nightmare, but Peshawar officials quickly realized that this is a problem they won’t solve anytime soon.
Jameel Shah, a spokesman for Lady Reading Hospital, said the hospital has treated 423 patients for rat bites since April 1, including 23 on Tuesday, as of 3 p.m. About half of the victims are children, Shah added.
Although Pakistan has not conducted a comprehensive census since 1998, Peshawar is estimated to have about 1 million residents. Going by that figure, one out of every 2,500 Peshawar residents was bitten by a rat in the past month.
New York, a city of 8 million that is also a haven for rats, usually registers about 100 rat bites each year, according to media reports.
That discrepancy between the two cities raises questions about whether all the reported cases in Peshawar really are related to rats.
But many poor Peshawar families sleep on floors or hastily built cots — and sewage lines often lead directly from poorly constructed houses into outdoor canals — so there frequently isn’t much separating rodents and humans.
Earlier this week, demonstrations erupted across the city as protesters demanded that local leaders do more to combat the problem, the Express Tribune newspaper reported.
The demonstrators held up signs while chanting “Go chooha go.” In Urdu, chooha means “rat.” The slogan appears to be a riff on a popular chant often used by political leader Imran Khan in battles against Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif — “Go Nawaz go.”
Peshawar’s rat crisis has even figured in the notoriously heated national political debate.