TRIGGERnometry - "Will Rats Cause the Next Pandemic?" - Steven Belmain

Episode Date: July 11, 2022

Professor Steven Belmain is one of the world's leading scientists researching the ecology of rodent behaviour at the Natural Resources Institute in Greenwich, London. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How serious is plague in 2022? It's still a big problem in many parts of the world. So just a few years ago in Madagascar, they were taken by great surprise in 2017, 2018, when they had a big outbreak. And it really caused panic there because normally it's a rural disease. It happens out in poor areas of the country

and the wealthy in the cities don't worry about it too much. But they got into the city. And, you know, there were thousands of cases, and several hundred people died. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you

if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. It doesn't get any more fascinating and a little bit different to what we normally do today because our brilliant guest today is a professor of ecology at Greenwich University here in London

who is an expert in rats. Professor Stephen Bellam, welcome to Trigonometry. Hi, it's great to be here. It's great to have you on the show before we get into the very interesting subject of rats, tell everybody a little bit about who are you, how are you where you are, what has been the journey through life that brings you to be sitting here talking to us? Right, okay, well, you might hear from my accent as we get going.

I'm an American. I'm born in the state of Maine, up in the northeastern part of the states. And so I did my first degree at the University of Vermont. And then when I was there, I did an exchange program and came over to the UK and worked at the University of Kent on an exchange year and fell in love with the country, fell in love with a woman, and decided to stay in Britain. So I've been here ever since. I did my PhD on an insect called the Death Watch Beetle, and now I work at the Natural Resources Institute, which is an institute within the University of Greenwich. And the Institute has a long history of working in overseas development research and linked to the

empire and science in developing countries and essentially run on the sort of tropical products. and how to live there, so issues with locusts and malaria and the problems there. So that history of the institute has been, for several hundred years, working in collaboration with a lot of institutions in those countries. And so my research is very much based on,

around pest management issues, whether that's rodents, which is a big part of my work, but also other aspects around insects and the management of crops and health issues related to pests as well. And when Francis was suggesting that we get you on, he was like, oh, we've got to get this guy on to talk about the ratpocalypse. Is there a rat apocalypse?

So are rats about to take over the world? Well, there's a lot of them. And I mean, people always have these anecdotes. We're never farther than six feet away from a rat. I don't really put much in store on that sort of statement because it does depend whether you live in the city or in rural areas. But rural areas have lots of rats too. I mean, if you live on a farm and you'll just see rats everywhere in the crop fields

or if it's livestock. So there are hundreds of rats there in cities such as London and New York and Paris. There are big outbreaks of rats. They're living in the sewers. They're living in people's back gardens. And there is worries that the population is growing. I mean, they are related to our own agricultural production, our waste in cities. These are all food resources for rats. So, you know, if you're out in the garden feeding the birds or in the park and you're littering, all of that is food for rats. So I think, you know, we really need to think more carefully about how we interact. in the environment and how we might be exacerbating some of these rat problems. The interesting thing with rats is that wherever human beings went, rats were never far behind.

So we've always lived together side by side, even though we found them disgusting. That's right. I mean, if you go down into some very deep coal mines, you'll find rats living down there, and Antarctica, where people have gone for exploration. We have mice living there now. So, you know, whether it's a desert or a place where it's just under snow all the time, rats are living there and adapting because we're there. They're, you know, taking advantage of our accommodation that we provide and the waste that we produce and the food that we produce. So they've sort of co-evolved with us. And that, of course, has a lot of implications in terms of disease, for example. So because they've been living alongside us, they're going into really dirty environments down

into the sewer and then coming into our kitchen and spreading those diseases there. So it's a real problem that we've sort of developed ourselves because of the way that we're living. And let's talk about disease because obviously they were responsible for one pandemic, a very, very serious pandemic. Could they be responsible for another? Yes, in fact, if you think of the plague, which is what a lot of people talk about in terms of pandemics, there are actually three pandemics in the history that were related to plague. So there was one plague before the medieval plague that we talk about as a black death.

So before that, there was something called the Justinian plague, which spread around. Then we have the Black Death. And now we are still within what is called the third pandemic of plague, which started in sort of international transport, steam ships going around the world with rats on board. And they spread rats to a lot of parts of the world, which had before, not had plague. So to the Americas, particularly Peru and the southwest of the United States, also have areas where plague can spread. And we're still within that, technically, a third pandemic still.

But besides plague, there have also been pandemics that have been spread on other days. diseases. So hanta viruses, it's a group of viruses, but in the time of the Aztecs and the Spanish colonialists coming over, there was some documented outbreaks of a hanta virus, which called massive population collapses at the time. So we should be worried because of that history, but also, I mean, their role in the current pandemic, we know quite certainly that rodents were not the sort of the development, initial development of the coronavirus. That was most likely bats. But rodents were certainly involved in the Obocron variant. So what happened is, you know, the virus has come out.

It is now spreading among lots of different animal species, not just humans. And it's got into the rat population, although to begin with, the rat population was resistant to the coronavirus. But it's got in there and caused a lot of mutations. So that's how Omicron is so different from the original coronavirus variants that were around. So Omicron was essentially probably somewhere in Southern Africa, not South Africa exactly, but it was mutating within mice and rodent populations there and then came out as it is now. So we should still be worried about other coronaviruses and the current

coronavirus mutating possibly more in rodents. But I mean, there are many other groups of diseases such as arena viruses we should be worried about. One of the most famous rhenoviruses is Lassa fever, which is really confined to West Africa, particularly Nigeria, Syria, Leon in those countries. But there is we've been observing over the last few years really huge outbreaks in Lhasa fever. Again, out of context, we don't understand why. Was this climate change? Is it something that we're doing that's different? But for the last few years, it's been massive outbreaks of Lhasa fever, spreading in new parts of Nigeria where in historical terms, they didn't really have much of any Lhasa. And so there are other variants of Lhasa in the

Americas, particularly South America and other parts of Africa. and there are worries about these mutating and spreading to other parts of the world. And we need to be careful and start doing more surveillance on some of these other groups of diseases which could result in a new pandemic. Because particularly when you look at New York or L.A., I was reading reports that the bubonic plague has returned to L.A. There have been instances. Oh, right. I haven't heard about that. Is that quite recent? Yeah, yeah, in the last few years. I mean, obviously there's a lot of problems with homelessness

and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. And it's not surprising. I mean, the southwest part of America where plague is endemic in the wild. So this is like New Mexico, Arizona, quite close to L.A. in that sense. Plague is a disease.

Like many of these romeborne diseases, they are diseases of poverty. So they're often found on reservations of Native Americans where conditions are quite poor and people are interacting either with pet cats and the cats acquire plague

from chasing rats around and killing the rats and the cats get plague, and then you're cuddling your cat, and it coughs in your face, and you get plague from your cat. But, of course, in other situations like L.A. in sort of poor conditions, it might be through direct contact with rats in some of the situations. Steve, and what is it about rats that makes them so liable to transmit? Is it how closely we live together?

Is it how many of them there are? Or is there something about the organism of the rats specifically? Yeah, I mean, it is both of those things. It's the fact that they are mammal. like we are. So, you know, they're quite similar in physiology terms, which is one of the reasons why we use them so much in medical research. And if you're testing new drugs and things, if you first will often test them on model animals, and often that is rats and mice. But it is the fact that they're also very numerous. And a lot of these diseases like plague are density dependent. So when

you have a lot of rats at very high density, the disease spreads in their population much more easily. And the fact that they're going from, say, these different environments are going to dirty environments where there might be a lot of bacteria and viruses around, and then they can take those into more clean environments. So that's, I think, quite different from a lot of other diseases we worry about because they just, you know, they're in a single species and they only have, like, a single disease. But rodents, we know they can transmit more than 60 different diseases to us. Some of those are really scary diseases like Lassa fever with high mortality rates. A lot of them are just sort of gastroenteric dysentery type diseases.

Things like salmonella and e coli and they're getting into our food supply, you know, contaminating in the food processing side of things. Or if you're living out in a rural area, they may be getting in your house and contaminating the food that way. Summer adventures are better with Minky Couture. From road trips to ball games, beach nights to backyard movies, Minky has you covered. Don't miss the everywhere blanket, water resistant, ultra soft and made for life on the go. Wherever summer takes you, bring comfort along. MinkyKouture.com, the original

best blanket ever. So what do we do with rats? Because they've always been there. They've always lived with us. How do you control the population? Because we're very advanced, nobody has been able to do it. Not easily. And I think this is one of the challenges. And I think a lot of people, in the end, they give up. And they just sort of live with a problem. And around the world, we've become over-reliant on a single technology, and that's the use of anticoaginant poisons. So these were discovered by accident, actually. So in sort of the 1940s and 50s, this group of kumarin-type compounds were discovered that they lead to blood thinning and prevent blood clotting. We now use them in medicines and sort of warfarin derivatives to thin our own blood. But in high

levels, of course, it interferes with vitamin K and stops your blood from clotting. And the advantage of that with rodents is that they don't notice they are being poisoned. So with a lot of the old poisons we used to use, they were what we would call acute poisons, things that are really, really toxic, things like strict nine and things that you use to murder each other, which kill really quickly and really painfully. But the problem with rodents is, I mean, they're usually quite cautious when they eat things. So they come along and they just eat a little bit, and they feel ill and almost immediately. So it's a bit like us. If we go off to a restaurant and have a meal, And later that day, we feel really awful.

We go, I'm never going to go to that restaurant again. You really sort of link the two things together. And rodents are able to do that too. If they eat something and they feel ill fairly soon afterwards, oh, that was really bad food. I'm not going to eat that. And they avoid it. So they become behaviorally resistant.

They didn't eat enough of it to kill themselves. So they feel ill, but because they're quite cautious, they just take a little bit. So the advantage of these anticoagulants that were fantastic innovation in the 1940s and 50s is that they would eat it and they wouldn't feel ill immediately. They'd go home, they think about it, hmm, that was really good food.

And then they come back the next day and eat more of it and more of it. And then they take a lethal dose and end up dying from it. Several days later, often, and often they're, you know, because they feel more tired, so of course it's what's happening is it's causing internal bleeding. And so they feel sort of, oh, well, just go home and go to bed. And that's often what they do. They go back to their burrows, fall asleep, and die there.

And so it gets around a lot of the behavioral issues with rodents. Part of the problem with these compounds we're having now is that they accumulate in the environment. So they don't break down. They've been synthetically designed to last for a long time. And so non-target animals are picking them up. So predatory birds and other animals that might eat the rodents, but even other things that are just in the environment are also acquiring these anticoagalant compounds. So there's a lot of legislation to try to stop using these.

these compounds. And getting that balanced right is quite difficult. So some countries are talking about banning them entirely. So we won't use antiquaglants anymore. Others are talking about, well, we need to regulate them better and make sure that only professionals use them, which I think is fair enough. You do need to know how to use these things carefully and to use them appropriately and not just let any old person buy them, which in some countries is the way it is. So we're in this challenge now where if we do ban these things, what are we going to do? There really aren't any alternatives. No one has really done any further research to develop new alternatives for rodent control. There are some new things coming along, but nothing that has been commercialized.

So one of the things I've been working on is fertility control, for example, contraceptives, which we know work with humans, and we actually do fertility control for a lot of other sort of feral animals, whether that's horses or elephants, to control their populations in sustainable ways. But the challenge with rodents, of course, is they're very prolific, they're very short-lived. So how do you get these fertility compounds in them and deliver that in a way that would still limit their population? So there are very few sort of alternatives, some products on the market, some other kinds of poisons on the market, but nothing really works. So if we ban them, then we have the opposite issue where particularly farmers, livestock farmers,

and particularly would be, what are we going to do about all these rats on our farm? we can't use poisons. And I would say, I don't know. Honestly, I mean, poisons are, you know, mortality control, whether it's poisons or using traps. Traps can work in some situations, but they're very laborious to use. So I think in, you know, Europe and America, with these intensive farming situations, having someone go around and set lots of traps all the time is really not very cost-effective. However, in a lot of the work that I do in Africa, in Asia and other parts of the world, trapping, I think, is a sense. solution. People can do it in a safe way. They don't need to use poisons. You can reuse the trap

over and over again. And that's about communities working together with those traps. And so we've been doing a lot of research on that trying to look at, you know, in small rural communities where a lot of people are involved in agriculture, living in communities to try to use trapping as a means of controlling rat populations. And it seems to work. The problem is they're so smart. They are smart, but we must remember we are smarter. Some of us anyway. People forget this. People think, you know, they try to control rats.

They put out some poison or they put out a trap. And inevitably, I will hear within the population over time, people will say, oh, they're too clever. They're avoiding our traps now. Or they're avoiding the poison, which, I mean, they do learn. They are, you know, they're mammals like we are. They are able to learn. But there are limitations.

to what they're able to learn. And I think one of the challenges with a lot of animals, again, it comes back to people and our human perceptions. We anthropomorphize things. We give other animals human characteristics. We do this all the time with our pets, our cats and our dogs, and think that they're, you know,

being able to really love us the way that we love them. But with rats, we do the same thing. I mean, they're too clever to control, that, you know, we give them abilities that they really don't have. And one of, again, sort of my jobs, I'm going out working with communities to try to deal with their rodent problems. It's making people understand what are their limitations, what are their real biology and behavior,

and how do you use that against them? So, you know, by knowing your enemy, you're able to deal with it much more effectively. And I think people, they want to hear those things, but, you know, they've had so much, they have so much cultural baggage sometimes with rodents. I mean, here in our culture, you know, we've got Mickey Mouse and all these sort of protagonists and stories that are all, they're the good guys, you know, the mouse is the, you know, the main character and the story. And that, I think, clouds our judgment sometimes and makes them, you know, into these superhuman animals. But so I think, go ahead. I was going to say, on the other hand, though, are rats not part, because there are a few types of, a few species

that I think human beings evolved a very strong aversion to from very early days, snakes, spiders? And a rat's part of that? Because a rat is a lot. I mean, a rat is basically a squirrel with bad PR, isn't it? Absolutely. They're not that dissimilar. It's the scaly tail, I think. If you've got a cute cuddly rat, it makes a nice pet, and people will feed it nuts openly in the park like squirrels.

But yeah, rats and mice, I think because they're somewhat nocturnal, they sort of skid around, and that sort of look of the scaly tail is what puts people off. I also do think it is related. People have been able to put two and two together around disease and hygiene and hygiene, and sanitation issues and so again in our sort of mind we realize these are things from me going back thousands of years we really should not be promoting them and avoid them Hey k k k do you believe in spring cleaning yes but only when my wife does it in russia men who clean are executed for not being real men which is correct well for those men who are living

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It's time to. throw out all your old hygiene habits and upgrade your life. And you were talking about population control before. Is that the only way to deal with it, basically to reduce the population of rats? Or is there any way to reduce the way they transmit disease? Well, there are other things we should be doing. And this is really, again, comes back to human behavior. It's about sanitation and proofing and hygiene and the way we manage our environment.

So in a lot of urban areas, we're just, we are the cause. Right. Where, you know, we're leaving food out and the bins are overflowing. The rats just come along and help themselves. If we did a better job at all that, we would have a major impact on rat populations. They just wouldn't, I mean, they need food. If they can't get access to food, then, you know, they're just not going to be so many of them around.

So there are a lot of things that are, you know, proposed in rodent professional management. You know, you need to try to make sure the rats can't get to the food sources. That's often very difficult if it's, say, it's a pig farm or a chicken farm, and there's lots of animal food around. But in urban situations, it really is no excuse. We should be able to do a better job. But the problem is, is we don't prioritize it. We don't really understand the impact, and we're quite removed from it, I think, ourselves. We see them, but they don't really have a big impact on our lives personally.

So we can just say, ah, that's someone else's problem. And what do they eat? Anything. I mean, most rodents, we must remember that most rodents, species just live out in the wild. They don't do anything of harm to us. They're just eating seeds. They're usually gran Everest, so they're eating different grass seeds and other things they find in the wild. They're part of the ecosystem. Thousands of rodent species live that way and don't cause us any problems at all. There's a handful of species we call the commensal rodents, the pest

species. So these are things like the Norway rats and the house mice that cause us problems. They are more omnivorous. And I think that's something they, again, because of that omnivorous ability to eat anything they come across. That means they, you know, they can easily live in a city and live off our waste, whatever kind of waste that is, and survive on it. Wow. You know, sorry, Francis, I remember when I was a kid, I was flying here from Russia and there was a guy on the plane with me who was on his way to, he ran an English language school somewhere in East Asia. And he told me the story about motor biking around Thailand or whatever. And he told me a story once he stopped to this guy's house. And because he was a story, he was a little bit of this guy's house. And because he

was this Western honored guest, the guy wanted to give him some meat. So his wife went outside and took a rat off the drying rack and served it. People, how widespread is the practice of eating rats around the world? You'll find it in different cultures around the world. So some parts of Africa and Asia, particularly that rats are seen as a delicacy. So in West Africa you have cane rats. They're quite a big rat, often not very much of a pest species, living out in the world, but they do get into sugar cane and some sort of crops. Because they're so big and meaty, people have domesticated them. So they're actually grown as a farm animal and sold to local markets that way. And other parts of the world, as you say in Southeast Asia, sometimes they're served at weddings because they're seen

as this, again, sort of an idea of fertility. So the young couple should be eating rats in order to go on and breathe themselves. And some places they're sort of tinned up in like little tins that you buy in the supermarket. Well, you can get tinned rat. You can. You look excited. Yeah. In the Philippines, they have something called star meat.

Rats spelled backwards. So if you go to the supermarket shelves there and you find star meat, that's rat meat in a tin. So it's all been hygienically produced and put up. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, in many parts of the world, you know, they're eaten not just out of necessity, but because they really like eating them. It has a, you know, a very distinctive taste. And, you know, why not?

As long as they are prepared carefully, you're not leading to some extinction. And in many, you know, pest management ideas, you say, well, if you can't beat it, eat it. It's one way of we deal with other pest species. But there is a risk, particularly with your, if you're catching a rat in the street. Yeah, yeah. And I think most people, where they do eat rats, they make a distinction between, say, house rats and field rats. And normally wouldn't eat the rats that are from the dirty environment. and are trying to eat them from the field.

And why is there a risk of eating a rat as opposed to eating a chicken or whatever? Well, I guess it comes back to just the number of potential diseases they might be harboring. And I think often it's down to the way rats are cooked. So, I mean, you can get very good recipes and things that will ensure that they are cooked properly and you don't have to worry about viruses and bacteria being transmitted.

But because sometimes they're quite small animals, they don't actually get cooked very well. So essentially they just held over the open fire and then you open them up and they're still pretty raw inside. And that's where there have been documented cases of people catching plague, for example, pharyngeal plague,

where the bacteria gets into the throat and then spreads through the body that way. And many gastroenteric diseases could be promoted that way, particularly if you're not gutting the animal, you just eat the whole thing, which in some cultures they do. Right.

Don't have your rat, medium rare. No, you're starving. Yeah. Make sure it's well cooked. And how serious is plague in 2022? It's still a big problem in many parts of the world. So just a few years ago in Madagascar, Madagascar is a country that's had plague outbreaks

almost every year for the last 120 years. Wow. So it's a chronic problem there. But they were taken by great surprise in 2017, 2018, when they had a big outbreak that got. into the capital city in Teneriva and to other urban areas. And it really caused panic there because normally it's a rural disease. It happens out in poor areas of the country and the wealthy and the cities don't worry about it too much.

But this particular outbreak, again, it started in the rural area and it got into the city and then it started transmitting human to human, which is, you know, if you go back to the black death, that's how it was primarily being transmitted. First it comes from the rats, but then it gets into your lungs and you cough out an aerosol of blood that someone else immediately inhales and catches playing that way. So that's what was happening in 2017, 2018, in Madagascar in the city. All the cases were pneumotically transmitted from person to person. So it caused panic and, you know, there were thousands of cases and several hundred people died. And because I always understood that it was transmitted by fleas. That's right. That's how it

still is classically transmitted. So it lives in some rodent species. Again, most of these species, they're living out in the wild, they're not really interacting with humans very much. They act as a reservoir for the plague bacterium in their bodies, and they don't seem to get ill from it. But then what can happen is those rodent species come in contact with other species that are living in our cities, the urban rodents. And so either the rodents themselves or the fleas jump off those rodents and get onto the other rodents. And those rodent species we call are susceptible. So they do fall ill eventually. And so you can get water, called ratfalls or mass die-offs of rats in cities that contract plague, and then all the fleas

on their bodies leave, and then what do they look to bite? Well, they bite us because we're the only other thing around to bite, and that's how the primary transmission of plague occurs. If it's not treated, eventually it spreads through your body, you get, you know, widespread, such aemia, it gets into the blood, it gets into the lungs, and that's how you can then transmit it human to human through sort of coughing out blood that's got the bacteria in it. So it's highly transmissible then once it gets to that point? Once it gets to that point, I mean, even at the bubonic form, it's still a very pathogenic bacteria. So with bubonic plague, you get the classic symptom is the swelling of the buboes, the lymph nodes.

Yeah. So it's either in your neck, your groin or your armpits, you get these big swellings, which in medieval times was well documented and it's a very classic symptom of plague, which no other disease really has. But if you get pneumonic plague, essentially you cough and you inhale it and it just rapidly, your lungs, you have pneumonia, you die from that. But bubonic plague can also kill quite quickly if left untreated. And that's one of the challenges in many of the countries that continue to have plague. People don't seek treatment quickly enough. Antibiotics will clear it if you go to your doctor and get the antibiotics. But if you live in a very rural area, maybe it's days to get to to the doctor and to then recognize its plague and be treated.

It's often too late. And unfortunately, people are dying of a disease that is curable quite easily in the right situation. And what's the likelihood of us having that type of disease in the UK or the US? Well, we have these huge rat populations, but we tend to have better infrastructure. Yeah. Plague has been used as a terrorist weapon in the past, and there are still worries about plague being used.

Yes, it was used by the job. Japanese on mainland China. So they loaded up ceramic bombs with fleas, infected fleas, and dropped these over cities to try to, you know, cause an outbreak. It's more about panic than anything. But, you know, it's a kind of biological weapon in that sense. The Russians learned how to put it into big intercontinental ballistic missiles with the bacteria itself. So the Americans look into this. We will send you rockets full of reds. The Americans tried to do this, but they could never get the bacteria to maintain its virulence in large cultures. But did the Russians succeed?

The Russians did this. And so they had these huge labs where they were using, you know, growing this bacteria. And they had to keep doing it all the time because the bacteria would eventually lose its virul. So they were recycling the plague in these missiles all the time. So at the fall of the Soviet Union, all these areas like in Kazakhstan and elsewhere where they had these big plague centers, they had to shut all that down. Fuck you know. But here now, I think our risk of plague naturally is very limited.

Right. So one of the things we know about plague in modern times is wherever it's endemic, it tends to be sort of a semi-erid environment at high altitude. So if you think of the plateau of Madagascar in the middle of the country, it's quite high altitude, the southwest of America, Mexico, Arizona, again, it's a mountainous region, the central area of Asia where plague evolved. the steps of Kazakhstan and that sort of area. Again, it's a sort of semi-arid savannah-like environment, which is why, again, it spreads a lot in Africa in general in those sort of habitats. So Europe

is not a natural place for plague. The climate is wrong here. But of course, in those days, you know, it spread human to human. You don't need the rats and fleas anymore. In fact, we had plague outbreaks in the time of the Black Death in countries like in Iceland where there were no rats. So that we know at that time, there were no rats in Iceland, and yet they had plague outbreaks, because it was just going from human to human, either through us coughing out an aerosol or possibly even through human fleas. So in those days, of course, hygiene standards were a lot lower. People, you know, they would move around. They'd have human fleas all through their clothes. People didn't wash very often. Their clothes weren't wash. And they were sleeping in communal beds

and going to inns, which were infested again, stories of, you know, being bitten by human fleas by the thousands. And so we, of course, don't have great evidence of it, but we suspect that those human fleas were probably transmitting plague throughout medieval Europe at that time. And Francis mentioned the huge rat population in different cities around the world. Do you have an estimate of how many rats there are in the UK? More than there are people by far. But it's a real challenge to put your finger on it. It's a lot of effort to try to get those estimates, you know, to go out and do a trapping.

But ballpark. Like there's 70 million people in the UK, approximately. Oh, it's at least three times that many rats. So there are 200 million rats living in the UK? I would say easily. It's probably much more than that. There have been some studies that have tried to understand how many rats are killed just in agricultural production. So if you think about, you know, the large cereal crops, you've got rats living out in those fields and they're just, you know, living in the soil, burying in there, eating the wheat or the maze or whatever it is.

And they till the soil, which in itself just chews up lots of rats. And it's literally billions of rats around the world in those sort of situations that are just being destroyed in agricultural production. So here in the UK, of course, there's a lot of livestock farms that are heavily infested. There's a lot of cereal crops where, again, there's just rats living out there, taking advantage of that. And that's in a rural area where, again, we may not really observe it very much. probably in the cities, I don't think the, you know, the rat problems are very high, simply because, again, it's just access to food and things. So I would say the rural population is probably a lot larger than what you have in urban areas.

Yeah, but I suppose the rural population is less problematic, quote, unquote, the city rats that are concerned about. People don't see it. I think, you know, that's the thing, you know, in urban areas, you know, I think, you know, during the pandemic, there was this sort of increase in reporting of rat out, rat numbers. And I think a lot of that's because people were sitting at home looking at what's going on in their back garden. and the local restaurants weren't running. And so the sort of traditional sources of food that people had for rats,

the bins at the back of the takeaway were not there. So the rats, well, where else were we going to go? So they went into people's gardens, and so there was a big reportage of more rats around, even though probably the rat population was declining during the pandemic because there was less food around in urban areas. And so what other impact do they have, particularly in cities? We've looked at the disease element of it, which is, of course, huge.

But what other impact do they have? Well, I think one of the most traumatic things that I've seen is people who have been bitten by rats. And it does happen here in the UK. I mean, it's not often, but there are stories in the sort of more tabloid press here of mum being eaten alive by rats. And, you know, this is usually someone who's very ill in a care home and can't fight off the rats. And, you know, they show pictures of her elbow all bitten up by a rat that just keeps biting her. In many other parts of the world, it's much worse where you can see. babies with their nose is bitten off entirely and you know sort of real sort of slum conditions where

these rat bites you know maybe 10% of the population that's routinely being bitten by rats while you're asleep at night so you're in your house you can hear all the rats running around and they're crawling all over you running over you while you try to sleep and a lot of people complain have disturbed sleep but then if you know if you've if you're sweating or you've got food residues on your on your hands or something like that the rats will come along and just start licking they're not eat you, usually, but then you twitch in your sleep, and then they bite out in self-defense. Really? So some pretty grotesque pictures and people that I've seen who've had really terrible,

terrible experiences where then it leads to infection and gangrene and people having amputations because of it, or just getting rat bite fever, which again is through bacterial infection, getting into the wound and spreading through the body. So rat bites, I would say, is one thing that I would... try to avoid. In terms of food contamination, it's really hard to put your finger on it again. It's an anecdote. We know rats are involved in salmonella transmission, but to what extent? It's again, it's a question of how much do we want to invest in trying to understand what the real impact is in food production, particularly, I think we massively underestimate the impact, but no one's

looking. And I think with a lot of rat issues, we just don't want to hear about it. We want to brush the issue under the carpet. We don't want to spend money on it. And so we don't know. It's the answer in many of the situations. And what about the aggressive nature of rats? Because that's something that gets talked about a lot. If you corner a rat, it'll go for your throat. Is this true? How is a rat going to go for your throat? You're 6'1 and a rat is this big. Yeah, I mean, rats... They're not. They're about that big. Rats can be quite aggressive. But I mean, I think most animals are if they're cornered. So, you know, if you've got one, in your garden shed and it can't find

the way out to get out. I mean, its response will be to try to attack you to get away. I mean, some of the Norway rats, you get on farms or in urban areas around here, they're very big, sometimes as big as your domestic cat. And if you've got a small cat, I've got a small cat at home, and certainly

some of the rats I've seen are bigger than my cat. And if that's battle sort of situation, you can see a rat winning in some of those situations. It's going to go for your throat. Is that why we're having this conversation? You're scared of a rat? Yeah, I mean, they would certainly try to attack you, but I suspect you would be so scared. Well, you'd be so, either so scared, you run out of the way, or you would find a way of dispatching it yourself.

That's what I would say. And then load it into a rocket and send it to America. A lot of people would get quite queasy about that and just run away themselves. It's really interesting. And Steve, what are you working on in terms of your research now? Are you trying to find solutions to some of these problems? Or you... Yeah, I mean, there's various angles.

Some of it is about sort of developing new alternatives for the poisons. And so fertility control is something we've been looking at in a number of different countries evaluating its efficacy. So one of the challenges here is that, you know, you've got a large population of rats that turns over very quickly. So how do you deliver something like a contraceptive to a rodent in a food bait? So it's essentially, you have to put out a bait. It's usually got a poison in it.

will it work when we put the fertility control in there? And again, it comes back to humans and the perceptions of that. A lot of people say, why are we just going to stop them having babies? We want to get rid of them. And so a lot of it is trying to make people understand that actually this is much more sustainable, more humane, for starters, but actually is more ecologically sustainable than trying to kill them. So if I can try to explain to you, what happens when you do mortality control is you kill off a whole bunch of rodents.

But you don't kill them all. It's impossible to kill them all. So those that are left recover very quickly. They go through very rapid breeding. And rodents are very good breeding machines. So they can do something called postpartum estrus. So that means as soon as they give birth, they can get pregnant almost immediately, the next day they can get pregnant again.

So they still have a young litter that they're nursing. So if it's a mother rat, she's nursing one litter and she's pregnant with the next. And as soon as those babies are weaned and go off into the environment, she's giving birth the next day. So the gestation period and the weaning period are coincided a number of days. So essentially every month, most species of rodent can have another litter of young. Wow. They're just pumping them out a month and a time.

So if you kill a bunch, what you're doing is you're suddenly opening up the habitat. There's a lot of food around because usually the food production is going up. This is the beginning of the cropping season. And so those babies realize, well, they have a better survival because there's a lot more food around. There's less competition because you've killed a bunch. And so they go through a population explosion, and the population actually can go higher than it would have if you hadn't done any mortality control. So it overshoots, and this is common with a lot of pest issues that we control this way. With fertility control, you stop those animals from having babies in the first place.

They're still there. They're still eating something. But the population, of course, can't exponentially grow as the food production increases. So it's more sustainable, but people need to see it at the end of the sea. in a sense. So they have to be patient, understand that the damage to their crops is going to actually be lower because you've managed the population and stopped it from going through this boom and bust phenomenon. So what we try to do is work with communities so they can understand that. But also, it's all about timing. When you deliver this bait? You don't want to just do it all the time, so you really want to just deliver it once, ideally, and have an impact throughout the next few months. So a lot of the researchers trying to understand these ecological issues

in different sort of context to making it work. So that's a big part of my work. Another part of the work is trying to really understand the role between rodent control and disease transmission. So again, it gets quite complicated in ecological terms in the sense you think fewer rats should mean less disease transmission. And with some diseases, that's probably the case, but with other diseases, possibly not.

So what can happen when, again, you kill a lot of rats or remove rats, whether, however you do it, those animals that are left might move around more. So they come in contact with more animals further away and possibly spread the disease so you make matters worse. So trying to understand these dynamics is another sort of fundamental issues. So for example, with plague in Madagascar, we're trying to control rodents, but then what happens to those fleas?

And could you actually make matters worse if you kill those rats? the fleas come off, are we responsible for causing a plague outbreak by killing rats? So it's really tricky sometimes. And sometimes these different diseases have different ways of sort of surviving. Some get into water or soil and then are transmitted that way. And so that's another big component in my work is trying to understand what is the best way of managing a rodent population to stop humans catching some of these diseases. Hey, Constantine, do you love trigonometry?

I'm from Russia, I cannot love anything, apart from vodka, miserable literature, and a horrendous downfall of my people. But yes, I find trigonometry satisfactory. And do you like live shows? Of course, but only if it's Chekhov play about collapse of Russian aristocracy, as they face death and obscurity before the glorious might of the proletariat and the beautiful revolution. Okay mate well if you like trigonometry live shows then get your credit card out for the lads because we're coming to the Edinburgh Festival this August We have only booked two shows August 6 and 7th because if we do more the comedy industry will treat us like the Tsars and execures That's right we're going to be in Edinburgh for two days only

Saturday's guest is Andrew Doyle which is sure to sell out our other guest is Leo curse, which means when Nicola Sturgeon hears about it, she'll ban us from Scotland herself. Tickets are sure to sell out and when they're gone, they're gone. Click on the link below and we'll see you in Edinburgh on the 6th and 7th of August at the Gilded Balloon Teviot. Come and see us before hordes of left-wing comedians try to put us in Gullag. And Steve, there's also a problem as well, isn't it? The rat is also celebrated or even worshipped in some countries.

I remember seeing a documentary about rats, and there was a rat temple in India. Yep, there are those rat temples. If you look at the Hindu god Ganesh, you'll often see riding a rat, like a horse. You're seeing, you know, he's perched on top of a rat, and that's his mosaic transport. And again, I mean, because rats in their status as a fertility symbol, people reverend them in that way. And these temples in India, people openly feed the rats because the rats are servants of the gods, again, to Ganesh and others. So by feeding the rats, you are helping feed your gods in that sense. So it is a challenge in some communities.

I mean, if you think of the Buddhist religion where you shouldn't harm animals, how do you reconcile that with pest control and killing things like rats? It's often quite difficult and requires, again, understanding human psychology and why we do what we do in order to really control a pest problem like rats. And what happens when you have like a rat temple, for instance in India. Does that then become a hub of disease? We have tried, well, not me, but some of my colleagues have looked into that because you get these big basins of porridge and sort of milky substances which are there

and the rats are coming along and eating from that. People have tried to test those substances, but so far I think it's inconclusive that we found. I think there is quite high turnover. So, you know, that food is constantly being replaced because there's so many rats living there, and the people who visit there, I mean, again, you would really have to do quite a careful study, and I don't think that's really happened to understand. Again, maybe because people don't want to know the answer. It's better not to know. So it's interesting.

Are aversion to rats is not universal around the world? No, not at all. I mean, even in European and Western society, people have pets, pet rats. You know, the fancy rats. They're just nicely colored Norway rats or mice. You know, people have them as pets. They're quite affectionate. I mean, most of these rat species that are pests,

they're also very social. So, you know, that makes them nice pets because they can be quite affectionate in that sense. So, I mean, there's a huge industry around that, which is also caused some ecological disasters, for example, in the pet trade. So there's a species of rat called the African giant pouched rat. Again, that's a big rat, long-lived species.

So people like them as pets. They have been sent off around the world for pets. And unfortunately, they've escaped to the Florida Everglades. Wow. And they are now a pest species there that is driving its own invasive ecology with

invasive pythons. So again, the pythons have escaped from the pet trade, living in the other glades, eating these African pouch rats in the Everglades as well. It's caused ecological disaster in the Everglades because a lot of the native species there have all been destroyed and out-competed by these species.

But also, I mean, these pouch rats have been used very nicely in helping us clear landmines, for example, so that you might have heard of the Hero Rat program or the Apopo program. It's developed by some Belgian colleagues and Tanzanian colleagues where they're using the acute sense of smell of rodents. They're very good at smelling things out, and they train the rats to smell T&T and bombs. And so they've learned how to use that smell to then, you know, they have the rats and they go through this area of field where they suspect there were landmines and they've trained them when they, when they smell T&T, they make like a little digging behavior and then they get a reward piece of banana or something to, and then something can come in

and clear that field of bombs. The way that dogs are used, but rats, of course, are perhaps a cheaper or alternative to that. They're also using rats to detect TB and screen tuberculosis, which is a huge problem in many developing countries and it's really hard to screen normally. It means usually a human staring down a microscope all day and often makes a lot of mistakes because they get tired. But again, the rodents are able to smell the bacteria in a sputum sample. So you can just line up a bunch of these patient samples and the rat just walks up and down and smells which ones have TB. And so it's, and they're very, very accurate, much more accurate than humans are. That's incredible. Because there is.

a flip side to the right and that we use them, like you said, in medicine. Yeah, yeah. And practically every drug we've ever had has been experimented upon rats. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, and this is the, I think, one of the trade-offs or the balances. You know, we want to, I think a lot of people see them with a version, but I think we have to admire them too. I mean, they're, we use them in many ways, but also just if you think of the diversity of rodents and diversity and biodiversity is really important. And there are really, there are more species of rodent than all other mammals put together. They're a highly successful group of animals living in the wild,

and it's because of these teeth they have. They have these big incisors, allows them to chew through a lot of materials. They have no intention of eating, but allows them to get into new habitats. They can get through your door or whatever barriers you might try to put in front of them. And so that evolutionary behavior has allowed them to be quite successful in the world.

So some of them are good. Some of them are. Hashtag not all rats. I've always found them so fascinating. What is it? What was the thing that drew you towards them? I really got involved by accident. I didn't start out as a rodent expert.

And I think that's something that, you know, some of my colleagues would also come from that background. We often get involved through pest management, which is often focused on insects around the world. A lot more people work on insects than rodents. in academia. And so I, you know, when I started working at the Natural Resources Institute, I was a trained entomologist, an insect person, and sitting around the table one day, you know, we had a request from someone in Mozambique asking for help and expertise on rodents.

I had done a little bit of work on rodents as an undergraduate at university. So I put my hand up and they said, fantastic, off you go to Mozambique. And I just learned it all there. You know, I was sent out to these villages where people were complaining of mainly post-harvest losses. So this is after they harvested their maize crops. They were storing them in their house all stacked up inside these maize crops. And the rats were living in the grass thatching of their roofs, just living up there, nesting there, and coming down and eating their maize stored in their houses. And of course, being bitten with plague and all these other problems.

And so we started trapping in some of these houses and I was catching, on average, a hundred rats in a house. Wow. These are, you know, tiny sort of mud-thatched buildings, one room, everyone sleeps together and the food is there, the kitchen is there all together, and all these rats are up there. And very little was being done about it. So, you know, that kind of opened my eyes to a problem that was being neglected, and I felt, well, we need to do something about this. Poisons weren't really an option because they were eating rats in these communities as well as a source of protein. And so we started this trial. on, you know, how can we just trap them out? Can we trap them intensively enough with the labor on hand

and all these households to do something about it? And from there, you know, I started making contacts with the rodent community. I'm not the only road expert in the world. There are many very well-respected colleagues who've been doing it longer than I have. And so I started talking to them and then developing more grant proposals and doing more research in different parts of the world. But we've also touched on the impact they have, the negative. impact on ecology. Like you said, the Everglades. And wherever human beings went, rats were very close behind. And then they succeeded in wiping out. They do. They're invasive. And, you know, this has been a big problem on islands around the world where, again, you've had these sort of

bird populations that aren't used to having rats around. We've accidentally introduced rats, and they just devastate the population. You know, they're, they may be flightless, or they're putting their nests in area where the rats can come along and attack the chicks and their nests. And so, We have tried to reverse that. So there are some people who have learned how to very efficiently remove rats from islands at great expense, but you can be done. And we've done this quite successfully in many small islands and even some large islands. New Zealand is even trying to do this across the entire New Zealand.

Really? Really? They have a program to remove not just rats, but all introduced species, which again has caused ecological disaster in New Zealand for a lot of. lot of native bird species and things. So they are essentially starting on this idea, well, we will clear parts of the island, and then they put a huge wall around that part to keep out all these invasive species. And then the idea is those walls will expand and expand as they clear more and more of New Zealand of all these invasive species. So I wish them luck. It's a huge

challenge, but they seem very dedicated to it. It's often a family activity to go out hunting on the weekend, trapping these species out, not just rats, but the possums and other things that they've had there to try to bring New Zealand back to the way it was before all these invasive species came in. And how likely is it that they're going to achieve their goal? If they're, if, I think they could, if they're, you know, they have to put the money into it and the manpower into it. And, you know, if they keep it up, and they seems to this, there's a lot of buy-in by the community, you know, the people of New Zealand have, you know, they, you know, they They understand this is important and this is what will do it.

If the population is behind it and puts the money into it and the labor, I think they could do it. It may take a while, but they already do have some big parts that are sort of already cleared around some national parks and things like that where they've been able to do this successfully. So it's just a matter of being able to expand that across greater and greater areas of the country. And where do they originate from then? So it's not from Australia or New Zealand or those poor South America? Well, it will depend on the species.

If we're talking about Rattus, so we have Rattis Rattus, which is the black rat, which we don't really have here anymore, but it used to be a big problem here. And now we have Norway rats, Rattis, Norvegicus. So Rattus is a genus that evolved in Asia, particularly Central Asia. So that's where the Rattus species are. So if you go to Southeast Asia, you will find a large diversity of Rattis species, and they're all quite similar. They all often look the same.

It's really hard to tell them apart, but there's a big diversity there. In other parts of the world, they have other groups of pest species. So, for example, in Africa, the main genus is called mastomis, or the multi-mammat rat. It has lots of nipples

and able to have very large litters. So it's a big problem in Africa. So there are these sort of global invasive species, like particularly ratis and house mice, musculos. These are the species that have really spread around in urban environments and when they have invaded new places, they've often, you know, resulted in extinctions and other things being removed from those areas. But then there are often sort of local pest species. So in South Asia, you have Bandukota species, which again look quite distinctive.

You get them in India and Bangladesh and Pakistan and they really are confined to that region. Steve, it's been an absolute pleasure and fascinating conversation. Before we ask you our questions from our supporters. We always end the show with one final question, which is, I know you're probably going to say RAS, but I'm going to ask it anyway. What do you think is the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Well, I mean, the Institute I work at is very much involved in overseas development research. So I think that's one thing I would like to highlight is that I think we sometimes live in a bubble. We don't realize how difficult it is in other parts of the world. And I would really encourage people to start thinking

about how can we support more research to deal with some of the problems that we have in, say, Africa or in Asia. Some of these issues are really simple to deal with, but we just need to do some basic research on it. So I would really hope that people will think more about what other people have to go through, living with rats, or whether it's other pest problems. We hear about malaria, but there are so many other neglected problems, and you really have to make an effort to inform yourself about some of these issues sometimes because it's just a lot of you. so many competing interests. And rats, I think, are neglected, despite, you know, myself spending so much time on it, there are very few of us working on this. And there are so many

other neglected issues like this. So try to go out and inform yourself on some of these developing issues. And I would say, you know, one place to look at is my own Institute, Natural Resources Institute, to try to find out some of the other things that we're doing. Steve, it's been an absolute pleasure. If people want to find you online, where is the best place to do that? Go to the University of Greenwich Natural Resources Institute. And there's little page up there about all the staff involved. So just Google my name and you will find plenty of links that way. Professor Stil, Berman, thank you so much for coming on.

And thank you guys for watching and listening. We will see you very soon with another brilliant interview like this one or a show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. Do they really come up the toilet or is my local plumber having me on? IP Vanish protects every device you own, your phone, your laptop, your smart TV.

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