New York City is losing the war on rats. This pestilence has resilience.

The rats seem more adaptable than the bureaucrats.

Despite increased funding and exterminations, the city’s rat population is still growing. Citizen complaints about these rodents are up by 40 percent since 2002.

In 2003, there were 20,900 citizen complaints, up from 16,000 in 2002.

In 2003 there were 170 reported rat bites, and 137 this year as of last month.

The mayor’s annual management report did not include the rat bite numbers this year – which is one way to make a scary problem seem to vanish.

The city’s health department says there are now six rats for every human in the Bronx.

There are rats on my block in Greenwich Village, gnawing through plastic trash bags at night.

In some poorer neighborhoods, residents say the current bold breed of rats will nest in cars and gnaw through the wiring, and stare down cats.

Nobody knows how many rats exist in New York. The estimates vary from 8 million to 100 million. There is no way to conduct a census. The City Council’s main anti-rat crusader, Bill Perkins of Harlem, told The New York Sun that his best estimate from experts is about 56 million rats scurrying around Gotham.

Four years ago Council Member William Perkins headed up a special council committee on pest control and issued a comprehensive report in February 2001. When Michael Bloomberg was running for mayor that year, he endorsed the report’s findings.

The Perkins report made two practical recommendations for action. One was a law requiring that plastic bags used for waste disposal be placed within rat-proof containers with tops, which would help cut off the food supply that sustains rats. This remedy was introduced in legislation form by Mr. Perkins, but it never got to the floor for a vote.

The second recommendation was to centralize anti-rat responsibilities in one city agency. For years rat fighting has been divided among many city agencies – health, sanitation, parks, housing, and environmental protection. There was little coordination.

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Perkins refined this proposal to urge the creation of a pest control board, as an independent agency, with the single mission of attacking the rat plague.

This notion has been codified into Intro. 534, which has 22 sponsors and has already had several public hearings.

Mayor Bloomberg has increased funding for pest control to $14 million this year and seems conscious of the problem. But Mayors Edward Koch and David Dinkins had cut pest control funding to $5 million between 1987 and 1994. And the rat population took advantage of this laxity to multiply, and become embedded in neighborhoods like the South Bronx, the Baruch Houses on the Lower East Side, Bushwick, Melrose, Highbridge, and East Harlem.

In the last year, rat infestation has afflicted Manhattan’s West Side, including Riverside Drive. I walked the area yesterday, and tenants, doormen, students, and dog walkers were full of tales of fearless rodents almost as big as cats.

Mr. Perkins is seeking the creation of a pest control board partly because he understands the health department does have higher priorities than rats – like infant mortality, HIV and AIDS, and TB.

“The health department is a big bureaucracy,” Mr. Perkins said. “Rats have to be an incidental concern when there are more urgent priorities. They do kill a bunch of rats at a specific location when they get a report. But this is a stop-and-go approach. What the city needs a continuous, comprehensive focus, by an agency whose only mission is enforcement, rat reduction, and focusing on ratborne diseases, like Leptospirosis.”

Leptospirosis can be communicated to humans by urine from an infected rat. If untreated, this disease can cause renal failure, liver failure, and meningitis. Mr. Perkins would like to see all dead rats tested for this disease as a health precaution.

New York’s rat plague is not a problem that can just be fixed by government. Citizen participation is essential.

Homeowners and tenants can start using rat-proof garbage receptacles now, cutting the food supply. Construction companies can do more to plug holes and abate rat breeding. Since rats are nocturnal creatures, perhaps garbage should be put out in the morning and sanitation pick-up schedules changed.

Rats cannot survive unless they are able to obtain food, water, and lodging. Right now New Yorkers are inadvertently providing all of the rats’ survival needs.