BEIJING (Reuters) - For countless rodents along China's mighty Yangtze River, 2002 is shaping up as the Year of the Dead Rat.About 1.2 million peasants are being ejected from the river valley before flooding of the Three Gorges next year to create a $25 billion hydroelectric dam, and officials want to make sure the rat population does not follow them to their new homes.
Sanitary workers have been ordered to scatter 120 tons of poisoned rice in the area this week, the Xinhua news agency said Tuesday.
The workers would then remove the dead rats, cremate their bodies and bury what's left, it said, quoting "mousing expert" Feng Shaoquan at the Chongqing Municipal Disease Control Center.
Xinhua quoted medical workers saying that the poison used contained ingredients known to have a curing effect on human heart disease and it would therefore cause no harm to the environment.
Pest control goes hand in hand with ambitious industrialization in Chinese Communist history. During Mao Zedong's 1958-61 disastrous Great Leap Forward, China declared war on the Four Pests -- rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows.
