These are not Michael Jackson's rats...

[Dannyalcatraz]

NYC rats, dirtier than previously realized!

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/york-citys-rats-carrying-viruses-130000460.html

And if they're like that in one major city, what does that imply about the rat populations in other major cities? Who will be the Charles Darwin of rat pathogens?

 

[Tonguez]

I'm sure you'd think again if you had a friend like Ben

Rats are wonderful creatures, they are intelligent and clean and make great pets (they're also good deep fried).
Unfortunately the poor critters get a bad rap when they are merely indicators of how disgusting humans are. Noone has ever been infected from a rat bite and if they are carrying that many parasites then the blame is the New York Sewer system and all the human waste that gets dumped into it.

Of course the 18 unidentified viruses is really interesting, but again people need to stop the scaremongering about bacteria and viruses too. The world, including the human body is teeming with billions of prokaryotes. They are only bad when humans are filthy and unhygenic and if the Rats of New York are carrying any pathogens that can affect humans then that is entirely the fault of New Yorks Human citizens

 

[Hand of Evil]

Agree with [MENTION=1125]Tonguez[/MENTION] they are only indicators of human habitation, if they have it, so do the humans around them. Sorry, New York, you're doomed! I remember reading an article a long time ago, call The Rat the Lapdog of the Devil, what a rat can do, is scary amazing.

 

[calronmoonflower]

Rats are incontinent and one of the spreaders of the plague. Of course any wound from anything that was in a sewer is a health risk.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/northwest/series1/rats.shtml
http://www.cdc.gov/rodents/diseases/direct.html

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Noone has ever been infected from a rat bite and if they are carrying that many parasites then the blame is the New York Sewer system and all the human waste that gets dumped into it.

That's simply not true:
http://cmr.asm.org/content/20/1/13.full

 

[Janx]

That's simply not true:
http://cmr.asm.org/content/20/1/13.full

"Noone has ever been infected from a rat bite" doesn't even pass a sniff test. people get infected from all sorts of bites. Some critters mouths are dirtier than others (alligators, vultures). But ain't nothing clean, so the probability that was a perfectly true claim was pretty low.

I'm totally fine with linking that dirty humans are what make rats dirty.

but outside the cage, rats are dirty, dangerous creatures because of the diseases they carry, as evidenced by the study.

Poop in a sewer may have diseases, but it ain't spreading it by itself. the rats are carrying it.

We need a guy with a pipe.

 

[Tonguez]

"Noone has ever been infected from a rat bite" doesn't even pass a sniff test. people get infected from all sorts of bites. Some critters mouths are dirtier than others (alligators, vultures). But ain't nothing clean, so the probability that was a perfectly true claim was pretty low.

I'm totally fine with linking that dirty humans are what make rats dirty.

but outside the cage, rats are dirty, dangerous creatures because of the diseases they carry, as evidenced by the study.

Poop in a sewer may have diseases, but it ain't spreading it by itself. the rats are carrying it.

We need a guy with a pipe.

Yeah okay, the noone thing was a bit much, nothing is 100% but rat bite infections are extremely rare and even Ratbite fever is mostly caused by rat urine rather than rat saliva. Rats just scavenge in human waste - the answer is to remove the waste. No adult has ever died due to rat bites, and generally someone close enough to a rat to get bitten has already been close enough to pick up its germs

 

[Ryujin]

Agree with [MENTION=1125]Tonguez[/MENTION] they are only indicators of human habitation, if they have it, so do the humans around them. Sorry, New York, you're doomed! I remember reading an article a long time ago, call The Rat the Lapdog of the Devil, what a rat can do, is scary amazing.

That does it! Throw up the wall and vote for the Duke of New York. The quarantine begins.....

 

[Umbran]

Yeah okay, the noone thing was a bit much, nothing is 100% but rat bite infections are extremely rare...

We don't have to resort to vague assertions. The following took me less than 5 minutes to determine:

This paper (from Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston) suggests that 1% or more of animal bite injuries come from rats. With 3.7 million animal bite injuries per year, that makes for 37,000 or more rat bites each year.

and even Ratbite fever is mostly caused by rat urine rather than rat saliva.

The paper says:
"The incidence of rat-bite fever after a rodent bite is unknown but the disease has been noted to occur in up to
10% of patients with rodent bites presenting for medical care (2). Rat-bite fever is a clinical syndrome caused
by one of two different organisms, Streptobacillus moniliformis and Spirillium minor, that are part of the
normal rodent flora. Pasteurella spp., Leptospira interrogans, and coagulase-negative Staphylococcus have
also been reported after rat bites (17). "

So, while there's some wiggle room, it looks like we have something like 3700 cases a year we could attribute to bites.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

And be that all as it may, the interesting part, as noted, were the 18 viruses new to science. Darwin's rules being what they are, we'd expect to find similar numbers of unknown pathogens among the rats of the rest of the wold's major cities.

That is a LOT of unknown pathogens.