What are the health risks of having rats in my residential or commercial building?
A. Rats killed one third of Europe with the Plague. Even today, they carry Plague along with many other diseases: murine typhus, leptospirosis, rat-bite fever, hantavirus, infectious jaundice, tularemia and others. They contaminate food and cause food poisoning like salmonella. They also carry a number of parasites like fleas, ticks, lice and tapeworm that take to human hosts quite easily. Equal to the physical health risks are the mental and emotional threats. People don’t like to share their space with rats. The noise causes sleep depravation. The smell is offensive. Knowing they are there causes stress and people are on edge. If a business is infested, employee morale and productivity drop dramatically, even to the point of losing valuable employees who simply quit rather than share their space with these beasts.
