Now You Can Be a Pest and Track Your Neighborhood's Rats, Mice, and Cockroaches
With the click of a mouse, you can now track the real mice infesting your neighborhood. The city's new Environmental Public Health Tracking Portal also gives you specific facts and figures about rats, cockroaches, air and water quality, and other woes.
You may have to tweak your computer's security settings to get the portal to work, but the Department of Health offers an easy step-by-step guide.
Once you're in, you can explore. Random surfing on the site reveals lots of pest problems in, among other places, central Brooklyn and the northwest Bronx. As a whole, many more Bronx children under 4 are hospitalized for asthma than in the city as a whole, the figures indicate.
More bad news for the Bronx: As you might expect, mice and rants run rampant in a much higher percentage of Bronx buildings than on the Upper East Side. According to the site's Health Data Tracker, almost 60 percent of Bronx houses have cockroach woes, compared with 12 percent on the Upper East Side.
Some areas of the Bronx, like the Crotona-Tremont neighborhood, have particularly severe roach problems. But Ivine Galarza, district manager of Bronx Community Board Six, tells the Voice that, actually, bedbugs seem to be a bigger problem. Can't really keep track of them.
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