Posted on 11/29/2006 5:15:38 PM PST by Palladin
AP: Feds Collect Giant Rats in Florida By MARGARET EBRAHIM, Associated Press Writer 3 hours ago
As the rising sun danced across Florida's coastal waters, government workers in shorts and T-shirts knelt in a grassy island field and plucked wriggling rats from traps laid the night before. These weren't just any rats. They were 3-pound, 35-inch-long African behemoths. They squirmed as the workers, wearing protective gloves, removed green radio collars that had been tracking the rodents' movements. All 18 of the animals were carted away for research.
Darin Carroll kept a watchful eye on that dawn mission at Florida's Grassy Key Island. Carroll is no ordinary G-man. He's a disease hunter determined to stop the next outbreak.
Carroll works for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and for three years he has painstakingly tracked the journey of Gambian rats from their African homeland, through the exotic pet trade, and to U.S. homes.
His quest is to prove what many scientists suspect: that African rodents imported as pets caused a monkeypox outbreak in the Midwest in 2003 that sickened dozens of adults and children with a virus related to smallpox. Scientists suspect Gambian rats may play a role.
Similar outbreaks have occurred in Africa.
While no one died from the U.S. outbreak, it sent warning alarms about the potential dangers of importing exotic pets captured in the wild.
Florida and U.S. officials are trying to raise enough money to kill off the Gambian rats that have proliferated on Grassy Key Island, just a few miles from the coast of one of the country's most populous states. The rats were imported to the island a few years ago.
"We tested about 10 to 20 rats a year ago," Carroll explained. "They were never exposed to monkeypox."
...more at link
we already have "senate-pox" and "house-pox"....
Giant Rat = Michael Moore.
When does Nancy Haber enter the scene?
Good job by the feds. Janet Reno and Alcee Hastings need to go.
Did some DNC types [aka giant RATS] go missing that the Feds had to track them down to Florida, collect them and then put them back? And what were they doing in Florida anyway, besides preparing some voting fraud?
Isn't it racist for them to catch "African rats" and not pursue rats of European extraction with equal intensity?
I dont know the answer, but people are idiots to bring in non native animals as pets and then let them escape into the wild.
susie
Boudreaux, he say "Put on a pot o' rice, Marie!"
Thibodeaux, he go and get de rifle...
Hey, Willard!
Well from what I understand the ones of European ancestry don't quite have the size and length that the African ones do.
220 Swift or 243 Win?
Those rats look BIG!
Heh, Thibodeaux think dem tings be nutrias, huh?
Don' much matter...he got fur, four legs, an' a tail, he go good with a pot o' rice!
It's not really racism, the African rats were live trapped while Rattus norvegicus gets kill trapped as always. < /tortured liberal style illogic >
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