Re: Mutants From The Sewer
- From: strabo <strabo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 05:49:42 -0400
Winston_Smith wrote:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,471237,00.html
Mutants From The Sewer
Scientists in Germany are worried about "super rats" that are
immune to poison. Researchers are trying to find out just how quickly
they're spreading.
Sounds like a new food source.
...
"At the moment, it's still possible to fight rats in Germany," says
Erik Schmolz from Germany's Federal Environment Agency. But he's
concerned that may change in the future. "The problem is we only have
one set of active ingredients we can use to combat the vermin," he
adds. No matter which brand name a rat poison product carries, they
all use anticoagulants which stop blood from clotting.
The poison works by effectively tricking the rats. Groups of rats
usually have tasters which try food first -- if the taster dies, the
other rats won't touch that food source. To get around this, rat
poisons are designed to take several days to kill the animal, so that
the rats fail to associate the poison with death.
With anticoagulant poisons, the rat dies from internal bleeding. The
poison blocks the effects of vitamin K in its body -- the vitamin that
regulates the permeability of blood vessels as well as blood
coagulation.
The first poison of this type was called warfarin, which became
available in 1953. It has many advantages, but also one decisive
disadvantage: Just a few years after its introduction, rats capable of
surviving their warfarin snack showed up in Scotland. The population's
DNA had mutated so that blood coagulation was not affected by the
poison. Today, resistant brown rats exist in several parts of Europe
as well as in North America. Many of these rats are immune to both
warfarin and some of the more recently developed agents.
"We've discovered the mutants in some areas of Germany as well," says
Hans-Joachim Pelz from Germany's Federal Biological Research Center
for Agriculture and Forestry. The area where resistant rats are
thought to live stretches from the northern edge of the Ruhr area to
southern Emsland in the Lower Saxony region. Its western edge extends
into the Netherlands. "That was the extent of our knowledge at the end
of the 1990s, at least," says Pelz. The super-rats have continued to
spread since then, and rats resistant to commonly used poisons have
now also been found in Hanover and Hamburg.
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