Nathan’s living nightmare started in April, when the middle-aged architect (his name has been changed to protect his privacy) had a sleepover at his Brooklyn apartment with Anna, the woman he was dating at the time. Anna (her name has also been changed) was in the midst of dealing with a rat mite infestation in her apartment, and she had the bites to prove it, but they weren’t that concerned: Everything the two had read online indicated the mites couldn’t be transferred from human to human.
But the minuscule parasites came along for the ride, and Nathan shortly after also began getting bitten. Now, more than four months later, the Brooklynite says he is still getting bites. When Hell Gate spoke with him earlier this week, he told us he’s been living out of a small backpack and moving each night to a different budget hotel room, afraid to move into an apartment he signed a lease on in July, and taking a cocktail of medicines trying to rid himself of an infestation where he says he has become the mites’ host—the mammal they live off to survive.
“It’s just a surreal, surreal life that I’m living right now,” Nathan told Hell Gate earlier this week, speaking from a courtyard in Sunset Park near a budget motel he stayed at on Monday night.
While not as well known as bedbugs or scabies, the tropical rat mite is another nasty pest prevalent in New York City due to our proximity to rats. Anna said the only solution she could find to deal with the rat mite issue at her apartment in Flatbush was to move out.
“This is absolutely a race and class issue, because I could leave. I had the resources to be able to leave, and a lot of my neighbors could not,” she said. “When I told folks in the neighborhood what was happening with me, I found out my super’s wife was experiencing it too.”
Rat mites live off the blood of feral rats, but according to health officials, they will enter the living areas of a home if their host rats leave or die, in search of a new blood supply, and they will readily bite humans. While some people are unaffected by the bites of rat mites, others will experience extreme itching and dermatitis, the latter of which is, as one study noted, “frequently misdiagnosed as allergies, fungal infection, or bacterial infection.” The mites, which are about the size of a period in 12-point font at their largest, are particularly hard to get rid of, some studies say, because they can survive for up to six months without a living host. A 2015 study found rat mites were common in New York City’s Norway rats, one of our dominant rat species.
One of that study’s authors, Matt Frye, told Hell Gate that he is dubious about claims that they can reproduce from feeding on people alone. “I am not trying to discredit the claim of the person you spoke to. But I am not aware of any published studies that prove rat mites are capable of increasing their populations by feeding on non-rodent hosts,” Frye said. He added, “One thing I know about the biological world is that for every rule, there is an exception. I’m hesitant to say that something is impossible, but rather, unlikely.”
Nathan readily admits that he can’t be 100 percent sure that he has become host to rat mites. (Some people, like this woman, are misdiagnosed with “delusional parasitosis” when they are in fact suffering from a rat mite infestation.) But he said he’s still getting bites, and he just wants it to end. “In the Venn diagram of, I do have mites and I get rid of them, or I’m suffering from some sort of delusional parapsychosis and this helps me, I don’t care either way,” he told Hell Gate.
Anna told Hell Gate that she is now “paranoid all the time.” “Anytime I feel itchy, I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, they’re back,'” she said.
As for Nathan, he’s “in a kind of zombie-functioning mode”: “I’m mostly worried about my future and being able to live a normal life.”
Below, Nathan shares his full story. Anna has also corroborated details included about her experience.
Source link
