PESHAWAR: Since the decision to announce bounty for rat hunters in the provincial capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has not yielded results, the district administration of Peshawar has now announced “operation combat” against the exotic species of rats that have killed eight children and injured more than 400 people in the city in recent months. The district administration has formed a committee consisting of officials of the health, agriculture and water and sanitation departments to start a house-to-house combat operation against rats, official sources said. The district administration has initially released Rs 1 million for the operation and the amount can be increased up to Rs 10 million to wipe out rats from the city, the sources said. The district administration has also decided to consult zoologists to check the population growth of rats. According to experts, a female rat produces at least 24 babies in 35 days. The district administration has divided the Peshawar city into zones for the house-to-house combat operation against rats. According to Dr Hina of the Lady Reading Hospital, who deals with rat bite cases, such cases are on the rise in Peshawar city. She said that 426 people bitten by rats visited the hospital for treatment in one week. She said that 30 to 40 people bitten by big rats were visiting the LRH for treatment every day. She said that rats could be rabies carriers and their attacks could be lethal. An assistant professor of the Department of Zoology at the University of Peshawar said that such combat operations were not the solution; an integrated approach should be adopted to exterminate rats through chemical and biological means. He said that use of chemicals could kill 70 to 80 per cent of the rat population. He said that 20 to 30 percent of the rat population could be chemical resistant and it would have to be eliminated through biological means. The problem has become so severe that even international media is carrying reports on it. In early April, The Washington Post reported how Peshawar was gripped with fear amid reports that supersize rats had infested the city, killing at least eight children over the past year. The story read like a nightmare, but Peshawar officials quickly realised that this was a problem they would not solve anytime soon. Jameel Shah, a spokesman for the Lady Reading Hospital, said the hospital treated 423 patients for rat bites since April 1, including 23 on Tuesday, as of 3pm. About half of the victims are children, Shah added. Although Pakistan has not conducted a comprehensive census since 1998, Peshawar is estimated to have about 1 million residents. Going by that figure, one out of every 2,500 Peshawar residents was bitten by a rat in the past month. New York, a city of 8 million that is also a haven for rats, usually registers about 100 rat bites each year, according to media reports. That discrepancy between the two cities raises questions about whether all the reported cases in Peshawar really are related to rats. But many poor Peshawar families sleep on floors or hastily built cots — and sewage lines often lead directly from poorly constructed houses into outdoor canals — so there frequently isn’t much separating rodents and humans. Earlier this week, demonstrations erupted across the city as protesters demanded that local leaders do more to combat the problem, a local newspaper reported. The demonstrators held up signs while chanting “Go chooha go.” In Urdu, chooha means “rat.” The slogan appears to be a riff on a popular chant often used by political leader Imran Khan in battles against Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif — “Go Nawaz go.” Peshawar’s rat crisis has even figured in the notoriously heated national political debate. Khan has been demanding Sharif’s resignation because the names of two of his children surfaced in the Panama Papers scandal involving offshore financial accounts. Sharif’s allies have been responding by mocking Khan — whose Movement for Justice party controls the local government in Peshawar — over his failure to tackle the rat problem. Peshawar residents, however, appear increasingly exasperated. Initially, Peshawar authorities hoped to incentivise the killing of rats by paying residents and professional rat killers 25 rupees (about 25 cents) for each rodent killed. But the programme apparently never got off the ground because of high demand and a lack of resources, Pakistani media outlets reported. There has also been a dispute between local health officials and sanitation officials over who should spearhead the campaign. Shah, however, said the rat infestations have clearly grown into a health crisis. Most of the victims, he said, live in 100-year-old houses in the centre of the city. “We have informed the district to initiate serious measures or otherwise there will be problems like rabies,” he said. Even the hospital hasn’t been spared. In recent weeks, officials have been scrambling to get rid of rats that have shown up in the hospital. The first priority was tackling the rats in the gynaecology wing, where newborn babies sleep, the newspaper reported. Over the past decade, Lady Reading Hospital has become one of Peshawar’s most important institutions because of its work in treating the victims of terrorist attacks. But the number of attacks in Peshawar has dropped sharply in recent months. And just as hospital officials thought they could relax a bit, four-legged enemies have replaced the two-legged ones. “We need to do something serious,” one senior hospital administrator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to the media, said Tuesday afternoon. “The patients just keep arriving,” he told The Washington Post.