Rats rule ok

摘要

RATS! The very word engenders disgust and loathing. Three species - Norway (aka common or brown rat), ship (or black rat) and Pacific rats - are closely associated with humans. They are known as 'commensals', which literally means 'eating at the sametable', so perhaps it is not too surprising that they engender revulsion. More people have been killed by rats than any other animal, due to the famines following their depredations on crops and grain stores - even today, roughly a fifth of all crops arelost to rats and mice - and the diseases they spread, particularly plague (see box, p64). While plague is now rare, another rat-borne disease - leptospirosis or Weil's disease - remains the most widespread zoonosis (a disease caught from wild animals) in the world, and up to 15 per cent of human cases are fatal.