Tanzania outbreak infection Citi Tanzania

The plague rat invasion which threatens the next pandemic

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www.telegraph.co.uk

Three months ago, rice farmer William Lebango put his three-year-old son, Stuart, to bed and sat eating supper on the porch of the small mud-brick home in central Tanzania he shares with his wife and three children.Suddenly, from inside, they heard a blood-curdling scream.

While Stuart was asleep, a rat had climbed inside his mosquito net and bitten his leg. ‘We ran in and searched for the rat and found it hiding in his bed,’ Lebango recalls, cradling his son and showing his scar from the rat bite. ‘But it escaped before I could kill it.’Over the ensuing months rats have continued to plague his family.

On the almost daily event that Stuart sees one of the rodents scurrying through their house, he runs away in terror and hides, calling for his father to save him.

Lebango’s other sons, aged 16 and 12, have so far escaped being bitten but his wife, Zwena, has been diagnosed with typhus (a rodent-borne disease which if left untreated can have a mortality rate of 60 per cent) while others in the family have been wracked with various mystery fevers suspected to be associated with the rats.‘It makes me so angry because it never ends,’ Lebango says. ‘Nothing can stop the rats.’Nightmarish stories like this abound in the remote villages on the border of Tanzania’s Udzungwa Mountains National Park, where Stuart and his family live.

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