Rats and Weil's Disease - and why you should cover fruit - and what restaurants should do

Problem
You have food outdoors or indoors and think you might have rats. Does it matter?

Answer
Yes. In the UK restaurants are told by health authorifies that food should not be left in open topped containers or exposed to the air on shelves. At night nice and rats and pigeons and insects such as cockroaches can crawl across. When they eat they excrete. Any time they feel like it they can urinate on food.

Apart from changing the flavour, this spreads disease.

That's the theory. Has it ever happened? Yes. Here's the evidence.

I had known that restaurants need to cover exposed foods especially outdoors and indoors at night. I had not thought about supermarkets, empty containers, rotting fruit which won't be consumed, or people disposing of rubbish.

Fruit
 Now you know to keep the fruit such as apples laid out on shelves, covered. And I would always wash off windfalls. You see birds and squarrels scampering about your garden in the daytime. At night we have foxes and holes in the lawn.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5499849/Tesco-delivery-driver-Weils-disease-rat-urine-wins-payout.html

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.