Trash Gone; Rats Turn On People

The mayor of Recife made good on a campaign promise to clean up huge piles of rubbish, but now residents are complaining that the millions of rats that once fed on the garbage are gnawing on people.

After his election, Jarbas Vasconcelos, mayor of this impoverished city in northeastern Brazil, sent sanitation crews into the city’s miserable shantytowns to haul away mountains of rotting garbage, on which millions of rats fed.

With less to eat, hungry rats invaded the shantytowns, gnawing on the feet of children and adults who sleep on the dirt floors of their shacks, authorities said.

Health officials said the government made an error by clearing away the trash without first spreading rat poison in the neighborhoods where the rodents had flourished--the hillside and riverside shantytowns.