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.
“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.”
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."
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.”
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?
Sources: ABC News; 1news; 7 News; The Guardian; Desert News; Yahoo! Finance; Washington Post; NBC News; NSW Health