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BALTIMORE CITY PAPER | 10/18/2006 Print

PHOTOS BY JEFFERSON JACKSON STEELE

EEK! A (BIG) MOUSE: Rat scientist Judy Easterbrook shows offher stuffed trophies.

One of the city's Rat Rubout vans

FEATURE

Rats They're Everywhere, They Spread Disease—And They're Gaining On Us

by Chris Landers

IT'S MIDAFTERNOON, JUST OUTSIDE the Johns HopkinsBloomberg School of Public Health in East Baltimore, andthe street is filled with the crowd from the nearbyhospital-shift-changers and the recently released, all surgicalscrubs and crutches. Greg Glass leads the way acrossWashington Street and makes a sharp left into a differentworld.

"This used to be a good alley," Glass says, surveying theexpanse of concrete in front of him. "You used to be able tostand right here and they'd run across your feet."

A bearded, compact man who teaches molecularmicrobiology and immunology at Hopkins, Glass has madea specialty of studying the alleys of Baltimore and thecreatures that inhabit them. He has worked with a variety ofanimals and studied disease in locations around the world,but here in Baltimore Glass is a rat scientist.

A few years back, he recalls, a garbage truck was disabled inthis alley-the rats had undermined the concrete with tunnels,and as the truck passed through the alley caved in, strandingthe truck along with its cargo of trash. "Then the rats justswarmed," Glass says.

Glass' association with the rat goes back to 1984, when hewas still at the University of Kansas where he received hisPh.D. the previous year. "All my friends were going off toColorado, the Philippines, the jungles of Brazil, and I wasteaching football players math and complainingvociferously to my adviser," he says. A phone call came tohis adviser from a former student who was working on astudy in Baltimore: "They were looking for someone whowould go in an alley and catch a rat." Glass headed east.

Now Glass makes a quick right at a T intersection, througha narrow spot and across McElderry Street, and we're back inrat country. Garbage bags line the sides of the alley,plywood leans up against a garage door with a large hole atthe bottom. Glass points to the evidence outside with a

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Rat scientist Greg Glass

Easterbrook's stuffed rats (installation view)

mock serious announcement: "And this is rat poo."

He needn't bother. A few feet away, the nocturnal creaturesare already stirring, darting across the alley from burrow totrash and back. A single rat, by itself, is unimpressive,particularly in the daylight. They can weigh as much as oneand three-quarter pounds but invariably grow in the tellingto "the size of a cat." There are a few in the alley now,rustling through the trash bags.

Judy Easterbrook interjects from a few feet away: "This is arelatively clean alley compared to most of them I've beenin."

Easterbrook is tall, with long red hair and an easy laugh.She also has a disconcerting habit, when discussing rats, oftilting her head to the side and saying "aw" in the sort ofcooing tone one associates with babies or kittens. Shemakes the sound now, when something in the garage nextto her starts squealing.

Back in the lab, she is eager to show off her rats, drawingdown from a shelf two taxidermied rodents laid out on a slablike pinned butterflies. As she reaches up for a third, awoman bustling through in a white lab coat rolls her eyesand says, "She's not getting that thing down again, is she?"

That thing, once it is down, turns out to be a rat thatEasterbrook had a hand in preserving. ("I put the skull backin.") The rat is mounted as a hunter would mount abear-reared back menacingly on its hind legs, fangs bared,arms outstretched. That, she explains, is how most peoplesee a rat.

Easterbrook, who is a fourth-year graduate student workingtoward her Ph.D., and one of Glass' students, sees themdifferently.

In 2004, she conducted a sort of one-woman rat census ofBaltimore, something that hadn't been done since 1952 andwas proposed by Glass as a dare. Easterbrook found herselfwandering the alleys of Baltimore, searching for signs ofinfestation.

She checked alleys in a variety of neighborhoods (she triedto hit all parts of the city equally), looking for signs-ratdroppings, burrows. She returned to some of the alleys withwire cage traps manufactured by the Tomahawk Live TrapCo. in Tomahawk, Wis. ("Home of the original wild trapsince 1925"), and basically trapped rats until there were no

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Liz McKnight (with Morgan) used to rat in Locust Point

Chuck Ochlech (left, with mustache) went fishing in EastBaltimore

rats to trap. Setting the traps at dusk, she would return inthe morning to retrieve them.

"There were people who would sit out and wait for me tocome pick them up in the morning," Easterbrook says."People were definitely superexcited about it and everybodywas always very curious."

One woman had moved from a neighborhood in WestBaltimore, where Easterbrook had been trapping, to aneighborhood on the east side, only to run into her again:"She walked up and was like, `You're the rat lady,' and I waslike"-she hangs her head-"`Yeah.' You definitely stick out alittle bit."

According to her paper, which appeared in the journalVector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases last year, there are48,420 rats in the city's residential neighborhoods, within amargin of error of 14,833 rats.

Her findings surprised Glass, although he acknowledges hewasn't really sure what to expect. A 1949 study, performedby a Hopkins researcher named David E. Davis, estimatedthe rat population at 43,200, well within Easterbrook'smargin of error.

There are two conclusions to draw from Easterbrook's paper.One is explicit: "Rat control methods over the past 50 yearshave not succeeded in reducing the rat population inBaltimore City." The other is implied by her inclusion of anumber from the U.S. Census Bureau. In the same 50-yearperiod, the human population of Baltimore City has droppedby 300,000.

The rats are gaining on us.

IF YOU SEE A RAT IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD, it is almostcertainly a Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus), also called thebrown, sewer, or alley rat. Another species of rat, the black,ship, or roof rat (Rattus rattus), was once present here, butseems to have been completely driven out by the larger,more aggressive Norway. Both seem to have originated inAsia, the black rat spreading out first and the brown nipping

at its heels.

Brown rats appeared in the United States during the 1770s on the East Coast and 1850s on the Pacific, spreading withEuropean colonists on the ships that brought them both here. By the early 20th century they had infested every statein the country. At our modern port, rats are apparently not a problem. A phone call to a Port of Baltimore spokesman

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drew the following response (after he had finished laughing): "Rats? We're more worried about terrorists."

Among animals, rats are unique in the way they relate to man. Elmer McCollum, one of the pioneers of nutritionresearch, found that their dietary needs are the same as ours. Therefore, McCollum was also one of the first to use ratsas test subjects. He received criticism from colleagues for working with vermin at the University of Wisconsin, butwhen he was asked to join the faculty at Hopkins in 1917, he brought his rats along. McCollum's research led to thediscovery of vitamin A, among other vitamins, and started him on a national campaign to reform the American diet.

Because of their natural tendency to follow man for food, to live where we live, rats are an incredibly effective agent ofdisease transmission. There is, of course, the infamous bubonic plague, which wiped out up to two-thirds of thepopulation of Europe and Asia during the 1300s. (Experts disagree on whether the brown rat was an agent of the BlackDeath during the Middle Ages, or whether that role was peculiar to the black rat, which would give the brown rat aheroic role by driving them out, fleas, plague, and all.)

In another paper, currently undergoing peer review, Easterbrook catalogs the diseases of the Baltimore rat. She trappedand tested 201 rats and found that more than half had antibodies for leptospirosis, hepatitis E, and the Seoul variant ofhantavirus. Seoul virus, which Easterbrook found in abundance, is a comparatively mild form of hantavirus, with amortality rate, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, of 1 percent. Leptospirosis, alsoprevalent in Easterbrook's rats, is a disease spread through contact with rat urine, a common enough substance ininfested alleys.

In 1996, a group including Glass and led by Joseph Vinetz of Hopkins, diagnosed several cases of leptospirosis inBaltimore. Two patients had cut themselves on broken glass while walking barefoot; a third cut his hand. A fourthman, homeless, got it while swimming in the Jones Falls. The symptoms of leptospirosis are similar to the flu andcan easily be missed by doctors. A 1992 study in a sexually transmitted disease clinic in the city found 16 percent ofpeople tested had it. The CDC reports 100-200 cases of the disease annually, although the rate could be higher-healthdepartments are not required to report them.

Glass and Easterbrook follow in distinguished footsteps as they travel the back streets and alleys of Baltimore. Ourcity has proved a fertile breeding ground for scientists studying rats themselves, rather than merely using them inresearch. Because of the rat's pernicious nature and penchant for spreading disease, the study of rats often has gone handin glove with the study of ways to kill them.

The 1940s were particularly good years for the scientists, if not for the rats, as Curt Richter, under the auspices of thefederal Office for Scientific Research and Development, led a team of researchers out of the Carnegie Building of JohnsHopkins (now the Old Carnegie Building on University Parkway). Their goal was to find an effective rat poison, andRichter later wrote that the program was responsible for the killing of "well over a million rats" between 1942 and'46.

The killing of rats was a wartime priority. Red squill, the rat poison of the day, was made from a plant found on theMediterranean seaboard, and Axis powers had cut off supply lines. Officials in Washington were also concerned thatthe Germans or Japanese would begin using, as Richter later wrote, "rat-borne germ warfare."

Despite funding from the city, there was considerable friction between Richter's group and then-Baltimore City HealthCommissioner Huntingdon Williams. The main point of contention was whether, as Richter believed, poison alonewas sufficient to exterminate the rats or, on Williams' side, the environment needed to be changed by cleaning up trashand removing food sources.

The environmental solution was also championed by David Davis, a giant in rat research from the Hopkins School ofPublic Health, who credited sanitation for controlling the rat population after Richter's poisoning program stopped.

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Davis found that after trapping and removing half the rats in a city block, the pregnancy rate doubled among thosewho remained. "Actually, the removal merely made room for more rats" he wrote in 1951. "Reduction of the food andharborage increases competition and thereby decreases the rat population."

Richter's autobiographical paper "Memoirs of a Reluctant Rat-Catcher," published in 1968, took the occasion to snipeat Williams some 20 years after the end of the program. The director of a city rat control program, Richter wrote,"must be a man who is willing to step out into the field to check for himself results of active control measures, andwho is not content to sit in his office simply dispensing advice about the importance of eliminating sources of foodand places of harborage."

Christine Keiner, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, is working on a book aboutBaltimore's Rodent Ecology Project, a Hopkins-based group that grew out of Richter's project and made Baltimore anational model for urban pest control. In an article published last year in the journal Endeavour, Keiner wrote aboutRichter's contentious relations with the city government and residents. People living in the testing area were requiredto leave yards and basements open to Richter's crew and could be fined if they did not. The researcher also refused totell city authorities what the effects of his poisons were on humans and pets, citing wartime secrecy. Dogs and catsturned up dead, and in 1943 two children survived poisoning after getting their stomachs pumped.

It is the Williams view that ultimately won out, in Baltimore and elsewhere. A 1957 article in the industry journalPest Control gives as an example in favor of the environmental solution to rat control an outbreak of typhus inMount Vernon.

During Richter's research, as the rat bodies stacked up by the hundreds (Richter reports 900 killed on a single night atLexington Market) an outbreak of Typhus killed one man and infected five other people in a single block of CalvertStreet in Mount Vernon (a seventh man caught the disease while attending the autopsy of the man who died). It waslater determined that the disease had come from rats who hitched a ride to Baltimore in railway cars and infested the railyards between Calvert and Guilford nearby. Richter's "quick kill" solution would not have prevented the outsider ratsfrom infesting the houses.

It should be noted that Easterbrook found the agent that causes typhus in 7 percent of the Baltimore City rats shetested in 2005 and '06.

Citywide studies conducted in 1947 and '49 by Davis lent further support to environmental rat control. UnlikeEasterbrook's study, Davis' work didn't concentrate on the residential neighborhoods but took in all the city rats. Hefound that numbers had plummeted from 165,000 in 1947 to about 60,000 in 1949, due to city efforts to rehabhouses, collect trash, and enforce sanitary laws. This approach is essentially the one followed today by the city HealthDepartment.

DR. JOSHUA SHARFSTEIN, who became Baltimore City health commissioner last year, says he met with his New Yorkcounterpart before starting the job. Sharfstein says he was told, "`I don't know what you think this job is about, butyou'd better read this book.'"

The book was Rats by Robert Sullivan, published in 2004 and subtitled Observations on the History and Habitat ofthe Cities Most Unwanted Inhabitants. Sullivan, who spent a year in the alleys of New York, observing, studying,and reading, kept with him copies of the works of Hopkins' David Davis, in the way that, he writes, "It is said thatAlexander the Great kept a copy of the Iliad in a precious casket as he went into battle."

Sharfstein is now something of a fanatic about the book. In a meeting in his office, Olivia Farrow, the city's assistant

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commissioner for environmental health, has to sheepishly admit she hasn't read it yet.

"The main lesson I took from the book," Sharfstein says, "is that, No. 1, it's an important issue in peoples' lives.No. 2, it's more than just killing rats. Rats exist because they have access to food and places to live. Rats can breedincredibly. If all you're doing is killing a few rats, you're not necessarily reducing the rat population. It really takes acoordinated approach to make major progress."

Sharfstein's point man on the rat problem is Ron Cuffie. Cuffie, who has worked for the Baltimore City HealthDepartment for 20 years, is currently in charge of controlling the city's rat population, a job that has rested with theHealth Department since 1947, when the problem of rat control was moved from the Bureau of Street Cleaning.Cuffie speaks softly, almost reluctantly, but warms to his subject. He has the air of a man who knows an awful lotabout the rats of Baltimore, and is sick of telling people about them.

That could be because Cuffie is faced with the difficult task of convincing people to clean up after themselves so thecity can go in and poison the rats. He receives 100 to 200 calls a week from rat-ridden residents, depending on theseason. There are more calls, Cuffie says, in warmer weather, but calls have been high year-round during the last fewyears. "We could use six weeks of a hard freeze," he says. Including sweeps initiated by Cuffie's department, his ninepest-control workers went out on 25,544 calls during the 2006 fiscal year. It isn't always as simple as cleaning up thetrash. Rats infest abandoned buildings, cars, and other areas as well.

"People think, If I don't have trash, I shouldn't have rats," Cuffie says. "You have rats also because of certain social,habitual, recreational conditions, or preferences. Even in housing. Ground-hugging decks-decks that are below two feet[off the ground]-make perfect harborage for rats. Grass cover-all that beautiful ivy, especially, or juniper, that coversthe grass. It's beautiful. It makes perfect harborage for rats-you can't see the holes.

"People's gardens-people are like, `Oh, we have a nice garden in our yard,' or something like that. You feed the rats.Tree stumps make beautiful homes for rats, or living trees for that matter. Fruit trees-people love them, like inGreektown with the fig trees or apple trees-all these kinds of things. Fresh fruit, bird feeders, squirrel feeders.

"So even those people, you go through and the alley's clean, the yard's nice, and they have rats, you'll find reasons asto why that quote `clean alley neighborhood' has rats. It crosses economic and social barriers. It's just worse in thelower-income areas in general."

Cuffie would like to dispel a myth about Baltimore rats. There are not, he says, more rats in the streets because ofongoing citywide construction on the sewer system.

"The sewer line that they're running, about 80 or 90 percent of the time, is parallel to the old line. The noise thatthey're making is not going to bother a city rat," he says. "When we did Hampden, we found virtually nothing."

If Cuffie is the behind-the-scenes rat man of the city health department, Jason Morgan is the public face. A tall manwith a close-cropped beard, Morgan took time at a recent Southwest Baltimore community meeting, after the servingof refreshments and a group recitation of the Lord's Prayer, to spread the gospel of rats.

He tells the gathering of some 30 or 40 people, most with plates in their laps, about disease, about leptospirosis andhantavirus. He tells them about the dangers of rat urine and how to catch a rat. (Peanut butter is the best bait, and ifyou use a glue trap, leave it uncovered in the path of the rats for a few days before uncovering the sticky pad, so thesuspicious rat will get used to the new object in its way.) He tells them that rats can jump three feet in the air, thatthey have poor vision and travel largely through smell, and that their hearing is 40 times better than humans'. He tellsthem that cement and glass, poured into a rat hole, will not prevent them from emerging somewhere else. By thispoint in his presentation, most of the people have stopped eating.

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Morgan tells them about the rat poison the city uses, an anti-coagulant that turns the rat's insides to mush, and thengives them the bad news.

"Eradication? We don't use that word," he says. "We're not getting rid of all the rats. What we're doing is controllingthe population. Rats were here before us, they'll be here after us. This problem . . . is not just a city problem. Thisproblem needs the assistance of the community and the community groups. The only good rat-proofing technique isgood sanitation."

It's a simple message-the same one Williams tried to deliver in the 1940s and Davis a decade later-but it has provendifficult to get across. For one thing, Morgan acknowledges that he is preaching to the choir. The overlap between thepeople who are responsible for rat infestations and the people who attend community meetings is not large. Lackingthe wartime authority of Curt Richter, the Health Department needs to get signed "release of liability" forms fromresidents before poisoning their yards, including a pledge to clean the yard and buy new garbage cans.

There is also a certain amount of red tape to get through from overlapping city departments. At the communitymeeting, a woman complains to Morgan about a building in the rear of her house. "Is this a business?" Morgan asks."We have other programs in the department we'll refer that to." Another woman worries about a city-owned abandonedhouse she is afraid to pass at night for all the rats. "That becomes a Housing [Department] issue," he responds, "thereason being that Housing handles abandoned homes." The woman shakes her head.

Under the environmental model of rat control, responsibility lies, ultimately, with residents. The city can only do somuch. A trash-can distribution program a few years ago, for instance, ended poorly when some recipients took the newlidded cans inside to store food in, so rats couldn't get at it, and put out their trash as before in plastic bags.

NEEDLESS TO SAY, Baltimoreans don't always see things the way the city government does, and a seeming lack ofaction on the city's part has been a cause of frustration through the years. No reaction to the city's rat problem,however, has drawn as much attention as the one mounted by Chuck Ochlech from an East Baltimore bar stool.

"It was the Yellow Rose Saloon, at Rose and Fayette Street," Ochlech recalls in a textbook Bawlmer accent. "Theowner of the saloon, Mike DeLuca, he asked me one day-he said things were getting kind of slow, wasn't gettingmuch business-`What do you think we can do to drum up some business?'

"Well, the Guide, the paper, had just put out an article the week before about rats in the city, and the idea just came tome. Why don't we have a rat-fishing contest. And he goes, `A rat-fishing contest? What do you mean?'

"I said, `Well, there's a moratorium right now on rockfish in the bay, and the reason is so they can replenish. If a lotof people get interested in catching the rats, maybe they'll have to put a moratorium on killing the rats. So we'll havea contest and run it just like a rockfishing contest or a bass-fishing contest.' That was 1993."

The rules of the Baltimore Association of Rat Fisherpersons (or, yes, BARF) were fairly simple. Only light tacklewas allowed (spin-cast, cast, spin, or fly rod). No wet or dry flies, hand or trout lines. There was a $3 entry fee, andrat-fishing licenses were printed up. The tournament took place in the area around the Yellow Rose, and rats werepresented (dead) in sealed plastic bags for a weigh-in at the end of the tournament.

"It's not as dangerous as people think," Ochlech says. "They think, Well, if you've got a rat, the rat's going to comeafter you. The rat's going to try to get away from you if they can. What they would do is, get on, reel it in, andsomebody would be standing there with a bat, and when it got close enough they'd smack it."

Hooks baited with raw bacon and peanut butter were the favored lure for the first few tournaments. In 1995, the last

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year of the tournament, continued opposition from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals forced a change topeanut butter-smeared glue traps on the end of the fishing line. The change did little to silence PETA's charges that therat fisherpersons were mistreating the animals: "They thought that was terrible, too," Ochlech says.

The tournament eventually captured the interest of the public outside East Baltimore. In addition to a 1994 City Papercover story, Ochlech and his tournament were featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and, Ochlechsays, "It kind of found itself as far away as Johannesburg, South Africa, Australia, Alaska-we got called from all theseplaces on it.

"[Kurt] Schmoke was the mayor at the time, and he even personally called me and asked me what did I think I wasdoing," Ochlech says. "The city had the Inner Harbor, they were trying to bring in all these people to see what a nicecity we had, and all of a sudden I've got this rat-fishing contest going on. So I told him, `Well, if you get rid of therats, I'll stop my contest.'"

Around this time, Ochlech says, he received a call from the tourism kiosk at the Inner Harbor to tell him that theYellow Rose Saloon had reached No. 8 on the top 10 destinations requested by tourists.

Chuck Ochlech is hardly the first to make a sport of rats, although he may be the first to have used fishing tackle.Whether because of their availability, or the sort of company they keep, rats have been used often for entertainment.Ratting, a sport related to bearbaiting and dogfighting, has a long history in the United States and Europe.

Full Revelations of a Professional Rat-catcher, an 1898 work by Ike Matthews of Manchester, England, contains abrief description of ratting:

The Rat-pit is of circular construction, say ten feet diameter, and about four feet six inches deep, the sides being perfectly smooth to prevent the rats climbing up and making their escape. A certain number of Rats are placed in the pit according to the arrangements made with the owner of the dog. Then the dog is put in the pit with the rats to kill them, which a good dog does very quickly.

In his book about the political gangs of Baltimore, Hanging Henry Gambrill, Tracy Melton writes that in 1956 theBaltimore Clipper newspaper announced a ratting contest between the Plug Ugly and Rip Rap gangs at a cityrestaurant. The advertisement offered cash for vermin to supplement the 130 rats already on hand for the match.

Ratting by a more genteel crew took place as recently as the 1970s at the granaries of Locust Point. It is a widelycirculated story-Greg Glass says he heard it from residents when he conducted his rat research in that area. A phone callto Liz McKnight on the subject brought this response: "Yeah, that was me."

A straightforward woman with an air of one who is used to getting her way, McKnight agreed to meet at PimlicoRace Course, where she sometimes takes care of horses. Rats are a particular problem at horse barns, where feces andgrain provide food and straw provides refuge. "Welcome to Rat City," McKnight says, waving at the horse barns.

McKnight is a master of fox hunting in Harford County. She oversees the care of 120 hounds and 10 horses, inaddition to the 15 horses she owns herself. Her father was a blacksmith at Pimlico-he shod Seattle Slew-and her greataunt, she says, was the first female horse trainer in Maryland. McKnight's love of animals extends even to the fox,which she insists is an intelligent creature that enjoys being chased ("They can get away whenever they want," shesays.) It does not, however, encompass the rat.

She thinks it was a neighbor, a breeder of Jack Russell terriers, who knew about the grain piers, although she isn'tsure where the idea first came from. "Who the hell knows how we picked this sport?" she laughs.

McKnight, along with four or five friends and as many Jack Russells, would make the trip into the city, arriving at

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the grain piers at dusk, and the doors were opened to let them in. "You had to put your socks over your blue jeans,"she says, "so the rats wouldn't run right up your leg."

The terriers needed no training, she says; they were just released inside. It was dark-even with flashlights it wasimpossible to count the rats. She estimates that 200 would be killed in a few hours, and while no exact tally waskept, the dog owners competed for kills.

"It was fun," she recalls. "We'd do it for about four or five hours. Really fun-the dogs just wanted to please you. Thenice thing was the Jack Russells would snap their necks, drop it, and move on to the next one."

McKnight knows that ratting, like fox hunting, won't make her any friends at PETA, but she sees both as atradition-not an aristocratic tradition, but an older one, shared by dogs and humans.

"Just like hunting is in our blood, it's in theirs," she says. "Something in human nature makes you do that."

BACK IN THE ALLEY near the Hopkins School of Public Health, this time well after dark, a woman in her backyard,barefoot, chats on a cordless phone while a small dark animal gnaws at the bottom of her trash bags 10 feet away. Afew rats go down to drink at a steady rush of water that flows unaccountably from a drain pipe into the center of thealley, making a small river of reddish liquid that flows down and into the street. An empty lot, overgrown, is alivewith rustling noises. A high-pitched squealing noise comes from the garage opposite.

Two rats spill out of the field, fighting briefly. The smaller of the two darts off and the larger moves boldly under thestreet light. There are at least a dozen rats visible at once, with the skittering and squealing sounds of dozens more.

The rats remain, and so do the scientists. Glass is gearing up for a study of the movement of rats through the cityusing microsatellite markers-"real CSI type of stuff," he says. Previous studies of rat movement, including Glass'own, involved following an individual rat on foot, with an alley map in hand. David Davis, whose papers arehelpfully illustrated with drawings of alleys lined with rat trails, found that rats stay pretty much in the same blocktheir whole lives and fare poorly if forced to move. Individual rats, he found, will cross alleys, but seldom streets.

Yet rats have been man's companion through the centuries. Judy Easterbrook, with her soft "aw" for the wild-caughtrat, is hardly alone. Even Richter, the rat killer, professed a certain admiration for his prey.

Bacteriologist Hans Zinsser's book Rats, Lice and History is almost certainly the definitive popular work on thehistory of typhus fever (if you read only one this year. . . ). First published in 1934, it has never been out of print.Zinsser's writing is wonderfully discursive, and he isn't shy of mixing philosophy in with his history. Somewherearound page 200, just before he introduces his ostensible subject, typhus, Zinsser compares the species: rats andhumankind.

Neither rat nor man has achieved social, commercial or economic stability. This has been, either perfectly or to some extent, achieved by ants and by bees, by some birds, and by some fishes of the sea. Man and the rat are merely, so far, the most successful animals of prey. They are utterly destructive of other forms of life. Neither of them is the slightest earthly use to any other species of living things . . .

Gradually these two have spread across the earth, keeping pace with each other and unable to destroy each other, though continually hostile. They have wandered from East to West, driven by their physical needs, and-unlike any other species of living things-have made war upon their own kind. . . .

Man and the rat will always be pitted against each other as implacable enemies.

© 2006 Baltimore City Paper