Vernon wants schools, homes, businesses to join war against rats
Published:Friday | July 11, 2025 | 12:11 AMChristopher Thomas/Gleaner Writer
WESTERN BUREAU:
Montego Bay Mayor Richard Vernon wants businesses, schools, and homes in St James to have their own rodent-control programmes instead of waiting for the St James Municipal Corporation (StJMC) to launch initiatives to control the parish’s rat population.
“Persons are talking about ‘rat this’, and ‘rat that’, as if the rats are coming from the municipal corporation. You have to manage each area so the businesses have to put their programmes in place, and I am sure that the public health services came out and called on the businesses to put programmes in place,” Vernon said at Thursday’s monthly meeting of the StJMC.
“We have our programmes at a municipal level that deal with rodent control. Each business, home, school, nursing home, wherever you are, you need your own rodent-control systems in place,” the mayor stressed. “They are not coming from just out of anything; there are breeding sites, sometimes on the school compounds … . I have seen businesses become breeding sites for rodents, and you have meat shops and restaurants that do not manage their waste properly and they store them at a particular location on the property and they become a breeding site.”
While praising the efforts of the St James Health Services to curb the parish’s rodent population, Vernon pointed out that it may be difficult to accurately gauge the reduction of rats.
“When you are dealing with an entire city and you do not have control over what is happening in the businesses, the open spaces, and the drains, it is kind of hard to gauge, so you have to work with the sighting benchmark. Sighting of rats is at a certain level, and the sightings may decrease, or the reports are at certain level, and the reports decrease, and you are getting it from the same source to have consistency to know the programme is working.”
IMPROPER DISPOSALS
St James has had a persistent problem with rat infestations over the years, despite several efforts by the municipal corporation and the parish’s health department to raise awareness about the problem and how to manage it. The issue has often been blamed on improper food and waste disposal, which results in breeding grounds for rats.
Kadene Grace, the St James Health Services’ public health inspector, told the meeting that its current rodent-control programme has reaped significant success since it started in May this year. However, she acknowledged that there were no statistics on hand for the number of rats killed under the programme.
“Phase one of the rodent control programme was launched on Labour Day, May 23, 2025, under the theme ‘Keep Rodents Away from Montego Bay’, and it covered 18 priority areas within the commercial district,” said Grace. “The team interviewed 198 individuals during the evaluation period, and an outstanding 95 per cent of the respondents stated that they have seen a reduction in the number of live rodents seen in the town, plus residents have expressed a need for the programme to continue and to extend to other areas.”