Rats share rooms at guest house

KOCHI: Around 120 rats were found sharing rooms with the inmates of the Ernakulam Guest House. These rats were found during a pest control programme conducted at the guest house.“On the first day of the programme, we found as many as 84 rats. In the next few days we had 120 of them. Most of them were found in the kitchen,” said a staff involved in the pest control programme, under condition of anonymity.However, the guest house officials denied the number of rodents found. “The numbers were much lower. Only a few were found and that too mostly outside the guest house building,” said Jin Joy, manager of the Ernakulam Guest House. But the official confessed that it was the first pest control programme conducted in the guest house. “We do in-house cleaning, but it is the first time that a pest disinfection has been done in the guest house”, the Manager added. Moreover, the Kerala State Warehousing Corporation officials, who conducted the pest disinfection, said that rats being found outside the building does not mean that there was no rodents inside the building. “The peculiarity of the rat poison, Rodofoe, is such that after the pesticide goes into the body of the rat, it will have tendency to move out of buildings in search of air and water. This is the reason why most of the rats will be found dead outside of the buildings,” said Unnikrishnan A M, senior assistant manager, Kerala Warehousing Corporation.While, some of the government buildings have regular pest control programmes, many other do not. Moreover, the experts feel that a one such pest control programme cannot be a permanent solution to the issue. “The things about rodent control is that once an area gets infected, it has to be monitored and operations should be conducted on a regular basis. One such pest control programme conducted at the guest house can provide relief for about a fortnight but soon the problem will resurface,” said Uma Maheswari, assistant manager, Kerala Warehousing Corporation.