RI, MA EHS Pest Control Blog

EHS service specialists were excluding a clients building by cementing openings and screening vents and a mulch bed for mice and rats in Boston's old and famous North End we came across a famous wild all American bird, the Wild Turkey! It's fitting that she was walking the historic Freedom Trail, Benjamin Franklin lobbied unsuccessfully to have this wise and versatile foul to be America's symbol.

It after all, sustained the easily settlers and native Americans in both wild and domesticated forms for centuries. She seemed content to strut among curious passers by near Boston's Paul Revere historical home, she joins our staff at EHS as proud Americans! We like native animals and it shows.

Johnny Pest

We arrived at a long standing and frantic client's home 45 minutes after she placed the emergency call of a nest of rats in her backyard lawn. We removed the thin layer of grass covering the shallow impression and were pleased that she did not have rats after all! We discovered six of the cutest baby bunnies you could imagine.

These Eastern Cottontail rabbit kits were very healthy. We follow the rule to leave wild animals alone. The homeowner has seen rabbits occasionally over the past three years and will keep an eye in this young family and report back to us on their progress. At EHS, we like to help people (and bunnies) and it shows!

Johnny Pest

Mayor blames open trash cans, threatens citations

People living in one section of North Providence say their neighborhood is infested with rats, and the mayor is threatening citations against residents who attract rodents by leaving their trash cans uncovered.

Eyewitness News cameras spotted two dead rats in a yard in the Marieville section of North Providence Wednesday.

Cheryl Rossi has lived there for forty years, but says the neighborhood never had a rodent problem until recently.

"Sometimes if you're driving up and down the street they'll be dead in the road, in somebody's yard, it's disgusting," said Rossi.

She claims the rats are ruining her family's quality of life.

"They've been in our backyard. I didn't even put up my son's pool this year because of these rats," Rossi added. "They've been up and down the street, and at other peoples houses."

North Providence Mayor Charles Lombardi tells Eyewitness News that food from open trash cans is attracting the rats. He says residents need to make sure their trash is covered to keep the rodents away.

Mayor Lombardi also says the town has hired a professional pest control company to educate residents about what they can do to keep the rats away.

According to the mayor, the next step is to begin citing residents who do not cover their trash.

Mayor Lombardi says the town cannot put out rat poison to kill the rodents, because of liability reasons.

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA

Tens of thousands of rats killed by Hurricane Isaac have washed up onto the beaches of Mississippi

Tens of thousands of rats killed by Hurricane Isaac have washed up onto the beaches of Mississippi and created a foul-smelling mess that officials say will take days to clean up, Reuters reports.

When the hurricane lifted the tides, the water washed across the marshy areas in Louisiana where the semi-aquatic rats live and forced them to ride the waves into Mississippi until they succumbed to exhaustion and drowned, said David Yarborough, a supervisor for Hancock County on the Gulf Coast.

The tides then deposited their bodies on the Mississippi shoreline, he said.

As of Tuesday, about 16,000 of the rodents have been collected in Hancock County, where a hired contractor's clean-up efforts are expected to continue for another week, officials said.

In nearby Harrison County, officials decided to carry out the work themselves. Using shovels and pitchforks, workers have removed 16 tons of the dead rats from beaches since Saturday and taken them to a local landfill.

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Studies of how rats and ants rescue other members of their species do not prove that animals other than humans have empathy, according to a team led by Oxford University scientists.

Empathy – recognizing and sharing feelings experienced by another individual – is a key human trait and to understand its evolution numerous studies have looked for evidence of it in non-human animals.

The ability to rescue another individual in distress, a typical empathic response of humans, appears in several other animals. Two recent laboratory studies led by US and French researchers looked at how rats and ants will attempt to free individuals of the same species they share a cage or nest with which have been restrained. However, writing in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, the Oxford-led team argues that such studies are not rigorous enough to separate examples of 'pro-social' behavior, the tendency to behave so as to benefit another individual, from genuine empathy.

'Empathy has been proposed as the motivation behind the sort of ‘pro-social' rescue behavior in which one individual tries to free another,' said Professor Alex Kacelnik of Oxford University's Department of Zoology, lead author of the article, 'however, the reproductive benefits of this kind of behavior are relatively well understood as, in nature, they are helping individuals to which they are likely to be genetically related or whose survival is otherwise beneficial to the actor.

'To prove empathy any experiment must show an individual understands another's feelings and is driven by the psychological goal of improving another's wellbeing. Our view is that, so far, there is no proof of this outside of humans.'

The team highlights how interpretations of pro-social behavior vary – rat rescues, for instance, are regarded as being motivated by empathy whilst ant rescues are not – even though the observed behavior (pulling on the legs or tail of the trapped individual, followed by biting at the restraint) are very similar.

In order to prove empathy any experiment would need to show that individuals changed their response if the circumstances changed; for instance moving away from a trapped individual if that reduced the trapped animal's distress. It would also need to disentangle empathy from acting simply to stop the trapped animal's stress signals – something that can be psychologically selfish and does not need to involve empathy.

Solving the riddle of empathy would have important implications not just for the sciences but for philosophy and ethics. However, the team concludes scientists will have to come up with new, more rigorous studies to show that empathy exists outside of humans.

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA

People never cease to amaze me! This person has rat burrows in their soil around their tree and the rats are burrowing under the slab. It could be the biggest waste of time and resources I have ever seen for rats. Needless to say they still had rats burrowing until we did PROFESSIONAL rat exclusion.

(click images to enlarge)

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

U.S. Marshals Seize Products of Rodent-Infested Fremont Food Company

The U.S. Marshals Service, acting on the order of a federal court, seized food products Tuesday made by a Fremont food company infested with rodents, federal prosecutors said.

The product seizure at the San Francisco Herb & Natural Food Company warehouse occurred after prosecutors filed a complaint in a San Francisco court, U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag said.

From July 3-16, federal and state officials inspected the warehouse at 47444 Kato Road and discovered a widespread pest infestation, including live and dead rodents and insects on and around food; rodent nesting materials in food; urine-stained packages of food; and rodent excrement pellets on and in food, prosecutors said.

The company has been closed since July 11.

The U.S. Marshals Service will destroy the seized food products if no one tries to claim them after 30 days, authorities said.

The joint investigation is being conducted by the Food and Drug Administration and the California Department of Public Health, Food and Drug Branch.

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

A Bay Area man has died after contracting the rare hantavirus - a viral infection carried by mice and passed to humans by the rodents' feces or urine - that he was probably exposed to while staying in Yosemite's popular Curry Village tent cabins, public health officials said Thursday.

The 37-year-old man, whose name and hometown were not released, died in late July, about six weeks after his stay in Yosemite National Park. Another visitor to the park, a woman in her 40s who lives in Southern California, also became sick with hantavirus but is expected to survive, according to the state Public Health Department.

The woman and the Bay Area man were in Yosemite at the same time in mid-June and staying in cabins about 100 feet from each other, but did not know each other, Yosemite officials said.

Lab tests taken after the two fell ill confirmed that the virus was present in fecal matter from mice trapped near Curry Village, a collection of tents and cabins in the eastern end of Yosemite Valley.

"The mice shed the virus in urine, in feces, and when the urine or feces, or nests, are disturbed, the virus can become airborne and infect people," said Vicki Kramer, chief of the state health agency's vector-borne disease section.

Both victims suffered from hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. It can take up to two weeks for symptoms to appear after exposure to hantavirus.

Most people suffer flu-like symptoms first, including fever, headache and muscle pains, often in the thighs, back and hips. After two to seven days, many patients have severe difficulty breathing and can die.

There is no cure or virus-specific treatment for hantavirus. Patients typically are hospitalized and get help breathing while their body tries to fight off the virus.

'Bad options'

"It's supportive treatment only. We have pretty unacceptably bad options for treating hantavirus," said Dr. D. Scott Smith, chief of infectious disease and geographic medicine at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Redwood City.

"By the time someone comes in with a bad cough and a fever, sometimes it's too late."

There have been about 60 cases of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome reported in California since the virus was identified in the United States in 1993. About a third of those patients died. So far this year, there have been four cases of hantavirus reported in California.

The virus is most commonly seen in the eastern Sierra and is rare in lower-elevation parts of the state. These two most recent cases are the first ever to be reported from Yosemite Valley, although the national park has had two cases in past years, both in visitors to the higher-elevation Tuolumne Meadows, said park spokesman Scott Gediman.

In California, the virus is spread primarily via deer mice, which have solid-colored backs and white bellies and generally live at higher elevations. Yosemite officials regularly monitor the activity of deer mice in the park, and crews that clean tent cabins are instructed to inspect rooms for mouse droppings, Gediman said.

No infestations

After the recent hantavirus cases were connected to the park, officials with the state Public Health Department and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention visited Yosemite and found no evidence of mouse infestations or unclean lodgings, Gediman said.

He and public health officials advised visitors to Yosemite and elsewhere in the Sierra to take precautions against contracting hantavirus.

People should avoid leaving food in the open, which can draw mice, and they should avoid contact with mouse feces or nests.

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

The Canadian province of Alberta, which has long treasured its status as one of the world's few regions free of rats, said on Thursday it is working to rid itself of an infestation of the vermin discovered in a landfill.

Sixty Norway rats have been killed so far in a garbage dump outside Medicine Hat, a city of 61,000 in Alberta's southeastern corner, and officials are taking steps to eradicate the rest of the colony.

"We've got them isolated in a specific area within the dump and we have the dump also contained," said Vaughn Christensen, the provincial official who runs the province's rat control program. "And then ... for a number of miles surrounding the dump we have an active baiting program."

Alberta has billed itself as being rat free for more than seven decades after moving in 1950 to wipe out the rodents which eat agricultural crops and spread disease. The province maintains a 29-kilometer (18-mile) buffer zone along its eastern border with Saskatchewan where bait traps are monitored in order to watch for any rat populations headed west.

The Medicine Hat colony was spotted after rats began turning up in traps in the spring and through public reports.

While some infestations are occasionally spotted and dealt with, Christensen said it is rare to find a colony the size of the one in Medicine Hat's landfill.

"It's hard to put a number to the size," he said. "But if we recover 60 rats above ground then it's logical to assume, because they (live) primarily underground, there's more there. ... But I think we're talking hundreds, not thousands, and not the hundreds of thousands you might find in other parts of the world."

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

Hantavirus Claims Two Lives

Two Utahns died last month from hantavirus, the first confirmed cases of the year and first fatalities from the virus since 2009, say health officials, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

"We usually have about one case a year. Sometimes they survive and sometimes they don’t," said JoDee Baker, an epidemiologist at the Utah Department of Health. "But to have two fatalities so early in the season was why we wanted to get the word out."

Officials will not release the names of the deceased. Both were adults between the ages of 20 and 65. One lived in Millard County and the other in Salt Lake County, but it’s unclear where they were infected.

"We know they had rodent exposure," because that’s how the virus is spread, she said."We just don’t know where. We’re still investigating."

Summer is peak season for hantavirus, which is carried predominantly by deer mice in North America.

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA