New South Wales and Queensland are being overwhelmed by a biblical wave of mice, which have taken over homes, stores, farms, hospitals, and automobiles. These nasty little rodents are eating everything in sight, leaving a path of destruction.
Reuters said, "the Australian state of New South Wales is suffering their worst plague of mice in decades after a bumper grain harvest."
"At night... the ground is just moving with thousands and thousands of mice just running around," farmer Ron Mckay told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
The plague of mice has cost farmers millions of dollars. Here's a video of hungry rodents swarming hay bales.
"It's a real kick in the guts," farmer Rowena Macrae of Coonamble told Queensland Country Life. "It's so tough to watch."
In Gulargambone, north of Dubbo, Naav Singh, told The Guardian he catches hundreds of mice per night at the supermarket he works at.
"We don't want to go inside in the morning sometimes. It stinks, they will die, and it's impossible to find all the bodies … Some nights we are catching over 400 or 500," Singh said.
"It's been going on for three months. It's going to be really hard, and we have lost so many customers," he said.
Pip Goldsmith in Coonamble told The Guardian she has caught at least 100 mice in her car and believes thousands are in her home.
"They stink whether they are alive or dead, you can't escape the smell sometimes … it's oppressive, but we are resilient," Goldsmith said.
Local media said the mouse population continues to expand, and poisoning efforts have failed as dead ones end up in residential water tanks. The government is warning residents about the potential for bacteria in the water.
"You can imagine that every time you open a cupboard, every time you go to your pantry, there are mice present," rodent expert Steve Henry told Reuters. "And they're eating into your food containers, and they're fouling your clean linen in your linen cupboard, they're running across your bed at night."
The mice can also transmit diseases such as hantavirus, leptospirosis, salmonellosis, tularemia, and the plague.
Local governments are weighing the option to spend tens of millions of dollars to exterminate the mice or let an eventual deep chill in temperatures with heavy rains wipe out the critters.
... and with the bubonic plague already surfacing in Africa - Australians should be on guard for a potential outbreak of disease.
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