In a very busy office at Third Street, several men come in and out, getting ready for another day in the job. At 8:00 a.m., New York City's pest control crews are already in motion, ready to fight what seems an unbeatable enemy in Gotham --garbage and rats.

There are reasons to be concerned about the presence of rodents in the city, says Dr. Ginger Chew of Columbia University's division of environmental health science. Rats can cause three main health problems: people can be allergic to them and the allergy might provoke asthma, they can transmit diseases when they bite and they spread bacterial diseases with their presence around food storage areas, says Chew.

"It's normal to have rats around," says Chew, "but it is also normal to have crime in a big city."

"Because it's normal it doesn't mean it's right," she says.

In a city like New York that produces hundreds of tons of garbage every day, rats don't have a problem finding enough to eat. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani issued the Comprehensive Rodent Control Initiative in 1997, in which 12 different government agencies participated. The difference between this initiative and others from the past, according to the initiative itself, is that the program includes a technique in which 15-block sections of the 69 selected areas would be attacked at the same time.

And it is the pest control bureau's job to do this, to take the food, literally, out of the rodents' mouth. Or to fool the rodents to eat their meals with a little poison.

The pest control bureau performed 56,257 exterminations in the fiscal year 1998, 19.7 percent more than the 45,198 in 1997. The New York City Department of Health received 15,423 complaints in 1998, 14.5 percent less than the 18,045 received in 1997, according to the department's public affairs office.

To accomplish this job, the Lower East Side pest control office has three teams. The cleaning crews clean up any possible source of food for rodents. The inspectors check for proper sanitary conditions in buildings. And the exterminators place poison in any area where rats have been spotted. The office does 10 to 12 inspections a day and as many as 20 exterminations. Cleanup takes longer, says Will Wagner, regional director of the Lower East Side office, and the jobs can go from a couple a day to one in several months.

For the extermination jobs, these teams use poison 99 percent of the time. The bait that is placed in areas that are only accessible to rodents. Also, says Wagner, one of the office's main jobs is to cut the rats food supply by cleaning up piled or exposed garbage in the city.

"The approach that is being used (to fight the rodents) is far too concentrated in poison and not in prevention," says Steven Frantz, director of the vector biology and comprehensive management program of the New York State Department of Health. For any pest control to work there has to be a better waste management in the city and the basement of the city's buildings should be impenetrable to rodents, says Frantz.

The size of the rat population, the health department says, is difficult to estimate. "There are some estimates on the number of rats," says Frantz," but it's totally bogus." The most common rat in the city is the Norway rat, which does not come from that country, as it was named incorrectly in the 18th century. It depends solely on what humans throw away, says Wagner.

Economics pay a big role in sanitary conditions and within New York City these conditions vary. "Poverty is tied to rodent conditions," says Wagner. In suburban areas like Staten Island or Queens, garbage conditions are better so there is less incidence of rat population, says Wagner.

The better the sanitation of a city the fewer rodents, although Wagner says that there is no city without rats. "The problem in New York City is no different from the problem in any other big city," says Frantz. But, says Wagner, "The more the larger buildings use plastic bags the more access to food there is for rats."

"Wherever humans are they'll be rats," says Wagner. "They don't go where there's no food."

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