We have discussed the risks associated with rodent infestations in a previous article. However, these impacts do not just pose health risks, they also have a monetary effect when they invade your property.
Rats and mice are indiscriminate and can infest any business or home, no matter how large or small, and although they have their favourites, they don’t care too much on what’s inside. The Pest Control Industry in the US had a look into the financial impact of rodent infestations – which they estimated at $18 billion in the US alone…
In this post we will dive deeper specifically into these economic impacts in order to highlight the importance of taking adequate steps to protect your property from infestations.
Property Damage
We have touched on this in a previous articles. Rodents have to ‘gnaw’ on objects in order to maintain oral hygiene and stop their teeth from growing too long. They’re not overly picky on what they gnaw on and can cause considerable damage to properties as a result.
Structural damage is common and will often be witnessed where rats chew on doors, walls or structural frames of a building. It can also be seen where rodents burrow beneath properties, such as garden sheds, or where they rip up insulation in lofts in order to build nests and reproduce.
There can also be significant damage caused to essential pipes and wires that supply the plumbing and electricity to homes and businesses.
Each of these factors can lead to costly repairs of property and appliances, loss of business due to downtime, reduced output when machinery is affected and even damage from fires or flooding where rats choose to chew through electrical wires or plumbing infrastructure.
Contamination & Food Losses
Rodents can access and contaminate huge amounts of food each year. Examples of this can be mice gnawing through packaging in your cupboards to access cereals or rats accessing food stored in your restaurant or outbuildings. Once they have contaminated it, the whole lot should immediately be disposed of due to the health risks these rodents pose. Farmers can also experience these problems on a larger scale, with rodents devastating crops in fields or accessing storage centres such as grain stores. As a fun fact to put their effects into perspective, at least 1% of the world’s cereal crops are lost to rodent infestations each and every year.
This means significant amounts of food each year can be lost, causing financial losses ranging from having to throw away a couple of packets of grains in the cupboard, to more significant impacts such as having to throw away large amounts of food in storage at a restaurant.
When they infest the supply side of the food industry (farming or crop storage centres) the loss of goods can mean an increase in price for consumers – so even if you haven’t experienced a rodent infestation directly, you may very well experience the economic impacts of one!
Health Risks & Healthcare Expenses
Rodents carry a variety of diseases that pose a direct risk to human health – you can read about them here.
These diseases, if contracted by humans or other animals, will require treatment by healthcare services. Needless to say, these healthcare services cost money (and are often very expensive) so create a wider economic cost in relation to those with free health care on the NHS. These costs can be exacerbated when the rodent infestations are not dealt with properly, and so spread and infect more and more people.
There can also be economic impacts on individuals themselves, with illnesses potentially putting them out of work, which can be a real issue financially for the self-employed. There is also a possibility that diseases contracted from rodents cause long-term, serious illnesses, furthering the potential loss of income from being unable to work.
Decline in Property Values
Not surprisingly, if word gets out that a house, or much worse an area of houses, have problems with rats, potential purchasers of the homes will be put off as they won’t want to deal with the infestation and the problems they bring – who could blame them!
The economic effect is simple. Reduced demand = reduction in values of the property or if the infestation is particularly bad, the property may not be able to sell at all.
Once a rodent infestation is known in a property/properties, it can take a significant amount of time for the reputation of that area to recover, with wide ranging and potentially long-term economic impacts on the residents’ ability to sell and move. The problems can be felt especially in areas where there are empty properties, or there have been foreclosures which, unfortunately, are outside of the control of the people still living in the communities and experience the impacts of the infestations.
Business Reputation & Customer Losses
For those who are running businesses for the long-term, it’s reputation is often seen as its most valuable asset. This reputation can immediately be harmed if word gets round that they are experiencing a rodent infestation. This is especially so in the modern world where the internet and mobile phones give people immediate and unlimited access to news and communications.
The reputational damage can lead to the loss of business from clients who may be put off if they attribute the infestation to a business premise being dirty or unhygienic (even though rodent infestations can occur through no real fault of the business owner).
This is especially so for businesses focussing on food and beverage services, where word of a rat infestation can, in some cases, destroy the business entirely.
In an office or warehouse environment, employees can become unhappy with their new long-tailed colleagues and spread word of the situation or even leave, reducing the output of the firm and/or creating costs associated with hiring new employees.
Unlike repairing physical damage caused by rats and mice, reputational damage can be difficult to quantify and has the potential to cause far more wide-ranging impacts. It is also far easier to repair a pipe than repair reputational damage.
Legal Considerations
Reputational and physical damage are not the only issues businesses face.
Fines are also available for those who are not following the rules in relation to pest management and health and safety. Even some of the biggest businesses in the UK are not immune from legal and regulatory persecution as Tesco found out in 2012.
The UK has a series of acts to protect people from the risks associated with pests and, in turn, place responsibilities and duties on property/business owners to keep people protected. These include The Prevention of Damage by Pest Act, The Environmental Protection Act and The Food Safety Act to name a few. We will explore this framework in more detail in future posts, however for the purposes of this article, you should know that authorities have the ability to impose fines, temporarily halt business operations and even force a business to close down permanently.
Given these wide-reaching powers, it is essential that individuals and businesses take proper steps in preventing rat and mouse infestations as well as dealing with them if they arise.
Conclusion
The economic impacts from rodent infestations can be far-reaching and hard to quantify. They can have immediate effects such as damage to property or food, as well as long-term and sometimes permanent impacts such as damage to the reputation of a business.
Given the above, and the fact that they breed all year round at incredible rates, it’s important to get on top of rodent infestations at the earliest opportunity to not only reduce the risks they pose to human health but also to ensure the economic impacts are minimised.
Good house keeping such as following industry health and safety measures should always be the first step in dealing with an infestation. Other methods such as trapping and rodenticides can also be used for quick and effective results. We supply a range of high-quality traps and rat and mouse poisons which can be viewed in our online store.
By implementing rodent control measures, you can keep on top of the financial detriments to your home, business, community and, of course, your wallet!
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