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St Andrews has been given one million pounds to spend studying RATS

No this isn’t for a sequel to Ratatouille


The University of St Andrews has just been awarded a £990,164 grant to undertake research on rats.

The award comes from the Wellcome Trust and will allow academics to research how rats transmit infectious diseases.

The Courier reports that the study is called The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis, a really fancy way of studying rats and diseases.

The study will begin next month and will be led by academics in Social and Medical Anthropology, who will be studying historic rat behaviours.

The project will largely analyse historical trends of rats and diseases. So no poor rats should be hurt in the making of this study.

The project argues that this research has largely been 'neglected' and that this is a chance to demonstrate what rat populations in the past say about diseases today.

The news even made the university Twitter, which features some questionable Victorian rat catchers.

The study will also look at public health history and rodent numbers. Isn't this a throwback to that time when you studied the plague in Year 7?