A Rutgers University study suggests the most common rat poisons in New York City may be losing effectiveness.
What's happening?
NBC New York reported that scientists analyzed nearly 300 rats and mice from pest control companies in New York City and other urban areas across the Northeast. The research team looked for genetic markers or mutations associated with resistance to rodenticides.
Mice showed the highest rates of resistance to anticoagulant rodenticides, or ARs, which are the most commonly used rat poisons in the United States. Nearly 84% carried at least one mutation tied to resistance to ARs. About 35% of the rats showed the same mutation.
About a fifth of the mice carried two of the mutations that allowed them to resist ARs.
The findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Pest Management Science, also matched reports from the field, according to lead author Jin-Jia Yu, a postdoctoral fellow in Rutgers' Department of Entomology at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences.
"We found that resistance appears to be much more widespread in house mice than many people realized," Yu told NBC New York.
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The research team said rats may be mutating at a slower rate than mice partly because of their behavior.
"Rats are very clever," Yu added. "They will approach the novel food many times before they really take the food or the bait."
Why is this concerning?
In dense cities and older housing, mice that are harder to control can become a larger and more expensive problem inside homes and shared buildings. If common poison no longer works as expected, infestations may last longer and spread more easily from unit to unit.
Yu's team warned NBC New York that increasing resistance to ARs could leave rodents with a greater ability to spread disease and parasites through communities.
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When a long-used control method starts to fail, people may have to spend more time and money dealing with a problem once considered manageable.
In one of the country's largest urban areas, the issue could also serve as a warning sign for other cities facing similar housing and sanitation pressures.
As the scientists themselves explained in the study, "The high prevalence of resistance-associated mutations in house mice suggests that different types of rodenticides should be alternated and integrated approaches need to be emphasized in rodent control."
Cleaning up crumbs and trash, sealing holes and cracks, and promptly reporting building maintenance issues can all make homes less attractive to rodents in the first place. Repeated infestations may require a more detailed control plan rather than repeated use of the same poison.
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