Rats Worshipped As Plague Rages -- Indians Are Dying From Rodent- Borne Disease

NEW DELHI, India - It's a health official's nightmare: tens of thousands of rats racing across the floor, feasting on fruit and candy.

At the Karni Mata temple in the desert state of Rajastan, the effort to stifle the first outbreak of plague in 28 years takes a back seat to an old Hindu practice - rat worship.

The marble-floored temple, one of India's most famous shrines, is one of many sites in India where rats are worshipped and fed as they breed and breed and breed.

Many of the rats leap onto a platform where food has been placed under a golden umbrella by worshipers, while priests chant hymns.

In Hindu mythology, the elephant-headed god Ganesh is accompanied by a rat whenever he travels. No Hindu worship is complete without an offering to Ganesh and his small companion.

During the 1940s and early '50s, plague routinely killed thousands of Indians each year because the impoverished nation had no real health-care program.

On Sept. 20, for the first time in 28 years, Indians began dying of the plague in the western city of Surat.

Since then, the official death toll in the Arabian Sea port has risen to 56. Unofficial estimates put the death toll at more than 300.

Plague cases already have spread hundreds of miles from Surat to New Delhi and the states of West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Punjab.

Fearing the plague could spread, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain suspended flights to India this week. The United Arab Emirates and Yemen suspended shipping.

The deadly epidemic in this nation of 900 million people has raised concern about rats which, like cows, are deified in India.

"This nonsense has to stop," said Kolomesh Chandra Dev, a retired government official who has started a neighborhood campaign to kill rats in New Delhi. "The time has come for people to realize it is either us or the rat."

In Calcutta, where at least seven plague cases have been reported, Hindu residents still flock to a city park to feed the tens of thousands of rats that live there.

"I do trap a rat when I see one in my kitchen, but I can never kill it," Amita Roy, a resident of the Vasant Kunj section of New Delhi, said yesterday. "It is a sin to kill the companion of our God," said Roy.

Bubonic plague is spread by insects, such as fleas that bite an infected rodent, then bite a human. Pneumonic plague begins the same way, but the infection quickly attacks the lungs. It is spread by coughing and sneezing.