Rats! A BBC World Service radio series. Producer: Kaz Janowski Content consultant and assistant producer: Monica Janowski

Transcription

1 Rats! A BBC World Service radio series Producer: Kaz Janowski Content consultant and assistant producer: Monica Janowski

2 Two half-hour programmes: New York Mozambique and Tanzania For broadcast as part of One Planet series in June 2005 Draws on RATZOOMAN for programme 2 Website at BBC will include audio of programmes and webpages for each of the programmes, with photo gallery + text

3 And here are the photos for the photo gallery, with draft text to go with them

4 New York webpage: photo gallery New York is a city with a garbage problem. Bags of garbage line the streets waiting to be picked up and meanwhile providing tempting pickings for rats. As one New Yorker put it: Rats? They re symbolic of New York. The dirty, dark corners of life, you know, that sort of hold an essence of New York.

5 The New York garbage collectors are good humoured and efficient in their fight against the constant build-up of garbage from the businesses, restaurants and private homes of the city. One garbage collector told us: There s rats all over this city Yeah, that s New York. We learnt that rats have preferences in garbage, it seems like many humans, they generally prefer fatty, fried foods to raw vegetables!

6 Jack Wiler is a published poet as well as leading a team of exterminators for Acme Exterminating in New York: I m the guy who sends someone else to do the dirty work. He told us exterminators see the world kind of inside out we go in the back door and what we see are walls covered in American cockroaches like the wall s shimmering, we see a dozen rats scurrying around. He explains the fear of rats in New York as dating back to the Middle Ages and the Black Death which killed half the European population.

7 Journalist Bob Sullivan and Kaz Janowski, producer of the series, with an inflated rat symbolizing greed - placed as a comment in the streets by New York trade unionists. Bob confronted his own fear of rats by spending time in Eden s Alley near the site of what was the World Trade Center in Manhattan: the alley is nicely especially in the summertime grease-slicked, there s kind of a slipperiness about the cobblestones.

8 Mozambique and Tanzania webpage: photo gallery Prof. Bukheti Kilonzo at Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania is an expert on plague called tauni in Swahili in East Africa. He explained to us how plague entered the area through old slave routes, coming originally from Asia.

9 When people get plague, they often go to traditional healers like Musa Shelukindo, who lives in Mbuzii, Lushoto. Musa told us that he can combat the invisible rats sent by rival healers, carrying illness and curses. Here, Musa is pictured with his baby daughter, who will, he told us, take over his skills when she is big enough.

10 In the village of Lukozi in Lushoto, a community theatre group acts out the treatment of a plague patient by a traditional healer they want to demonstrate to other villagers that failing to go to the government clinic for modern medicines, when someone has plague, can lead to death.

11 In some parts of East Africa, like Morrumbala in northern Mozambique, young boys like the Xavier brothers pictured here go hunting for rats as food. Rats are considered a delicacy; they re also one of the few animals left to hunt, and one of the few sources of regular protein for many families. But eating rats is risky, since it can mean catching plague and other illnesses.

12 A colleague of Prof. Kilonzo s at Sokoine University is Prof. Robert Machang u, who is Head of the Pest Research Institute there. Here, research is carried out not only on how rats can transmit some illnesses but on how they can help to eliminate others, and help humankind for example, identifying TB patients through smell and sniffing out landmines. Prof. Machang u is showing us some of the frozen rats which the Centre uses for some of its research.

13 The giant African pouch rat is the species being trained to find landmines at Sokoine University. Each rat has a name and trainers like Jared Mumbo have good relationships with the rats they look after, like Basra, shown here.

14 We still don t know very much about the ways in which rats are involved in transmitting diseases. The European Union is funding a project called RATZOOMAN, led by the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Greenwich, which aims to find out more. Researchers on the project pictured here at a meeting in Amsterdam in April 2005 range from pest ecologists to anthropologists and GIS specialists, and come from many countries in Africa and Europe.

15 And some more photos for your enjoyment.

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