Australia's devastating mouse plague?has been laid bare in a shocking incident, wherein a farmer's wife was hospitalised after she woke up to a mouse eating her eyeball.
According to a report in the New York Post, the woman was rushed to a local hospital after waking up horrified.? Millions of mice continue to torment communities across the country, and there's no end in sight.
The incident is said to have reportedly taken place last month, in New South Wales (NSW).??
Country towns in NSW have been gripped for the past nine months by a severe stomach-churning plague of mice, seeing schools, homes and hospitals overrun as farmers lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in crops.
The plague has been especially hard on farmers, who have had to? deal with rodents invading their homes and disrupting their lives, but also eating their crops and killing their income.?
In another stomach-churning incident, a farmer felt a mouse crawl across his face.?¡°I felt a tickly, furry sensation as it crawled from behind my ear across my cheek,¡± Mick Harris, a farmer told The?Times.?
¡°It made my skin crawl. My hair stood up and I jumped out of bed," he added.?
Experts have described it as Australia's worst rodent outbreak in more than 30 years, reports with many people being attacked by the disease-ridden animals.
Add to this the fact that mice have a short breeding cycle (a pair of breeding mice can give birth to a new litter every 21 days or so) and are not very choosy about food. The health department of Australia¡¯s Victoria state notes that rodents (which includes rats and mice) are the second most successful mammals on the planet after humans.??
A mouse can live for up to two or three years - and females can start reproducing at just six weeks of age.
Experts have warned "without a concerted baiting effort in the next few weeks this could easily turn into a two-year plague event".