Rats is the secret code word to get the health department involved.
Yup. Everyone wants people to take their whine seriously, and so they invent imagined dangers in an effort to spur government action to get what they want.
"For the Children" is another such attempt to spur government action.
I can imagine why the health department was called. What the “journalists” left out or failed to learn was why, in the first place, was the man collecting the boxes. That, not the public health issue, is the question/mystery.