The Mouse Plague: Will It Reach WA?
If you have been following the news, you may feel as though Australia is in biblical times. There is a terrible drought, worst bushfires ever recorded, a flood, a pandemic and now there’s the mice…
Mice have been wreaking havoc around the eastern states. They are in beds, people getting nibbled on at night… They’re everywhere.
"They are causing nightmares in the home, chewing through mattresses, spoiling food and people are waking up with them on their face," NSW Farmers grains committee chair Matthew Madden stated.
The Scope Of The Infestation
- One supermarket owner said they were catching 200 and night there have been people catching a couple hundred in the pool filters every night.
- “We don’t want to go inside (his store) in the morning sometimes. It stinks, they will die and it’s impossible to find all their bodies… Some nights we catch over 400 or 500” a local man told the guardian. "It stinks.”
- A farmer in the area lost a crop, worth $200,000 to $300,000, to the insatiable creatures. “He had a thousand tonne crop of grain sorghum, and it is a complete write-off. They ate the lot. They baited it five times to try and suppress the mice, but they just ate the lot." Explained Alan Brown, farmer in Wagga Wagga and member of the NSW Farmers Association, told Guardian Australia.
- Mice have also been reported biting Hospital patients! NSW health confirmed at least three people were bitten whilst being treated at Hospital’s in regional NSW for unrelated reasons.
“They are causing serious problems now, with people getting bitten,” he said. “Rats are at a nuisance level, but the mice are in plague proportions, particularly in the north and west and south-west of the state.”
The Mouse Plague: Health Issues
CSIRO mice expert Steve Henry stated that the impacts on affected communities, both psychological and financial are immeasurable.
"People are psychologically exhausted by this - the mice are just everywhere."
"Every time you want to try and get some clean linen out of the cupboard, you've got to take it out, wash it, hang it on the line, and put it on your beds straight off the clothesline because if you put it back in the linen closet the mice are going to be into it again."
"No one ever forgets living through a mouse outbreak, it is such a distressing thing."
Reported Rare Diseases
- The public health director of the Western NSW local health district, Priscilla Stanley, told the ABC that she had received a report of a rare mouse-related illness that had been contracted. Lymphocytic Choriomeningitis “is linked to mice but it’s very rare. People described sore red eyes as a symptom.”
- NSW Health has been notified of 23 case of leptospirosis - a rare disease which can cause kidney failure and meningitis which is commonly passed on by mice - so far in 2021, compared to 11 last year.
Calls For Action
Farmers are begging for help to end the biblical mouse plague that has for months troubled regional NSW communities.
Over a dozen mayors in New South Wales have reached out to the state government to declare the infestation an official plague, The Guardian reports. The mayors are also asking for help in the form of additional bait but no aid has been delivered so far, according to the site. “I can’t understand why [ they won’t declare it a plague ]. It’s worse than the 1984 mice plague,” said Al Karanouh, the mayor of one of the affected NSW towns, told The Guardian. “I think they don’t want to do it because they’re going to have to fork out a lot of money.”
The Spread
But New South Wales is not the only state that has been infested by mice, Millions of mice are now on the March with some serious infestations occurring in regional Queensland, Victoria and South Australia. Will the Mouse plague reach Western Australia?
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Have a mice problem at your home or workplace? Call Pestpro on (08) 9336 6944.
Sources: ABC News; 1news; 7 News; The Guardian; Desert News; Yahoo! Finance; Washington Post; NBC News; NSW Health
