NewRomeTacitus wrote: "One report had a distraught mother having to shake the gnawing rats off of her infant."
That's a report I would like to read. In school I read something similar in The Jungle by Upton Sinclair but of course that was a fictional account about rats in a meat processing plant.
I thought of the Sinclair story myself while reading it - but I saw it in print somewhere in the late 1990s regardless.
Please pardon my mentioning something without an immediately accessed link. You've encouraged me to be more stringent.