The Ministry of Health of the Republic of Cuba and the Historian's Office of Havana agreed with Mundo Sano on the design and execution of a rodent control program in the oldest area of the island's capital city.

Pursuant to the agreement, the tasks will start next March and will continue through December. The specific goals of the program are to drastically diminish the current rodent population to tolerable levels; to encourage the creation of a surveillance and control system, which integrated to the community, is capable of sustaining in time the results to be achieved; and to promote the awareness of individuals, families, and the general community to participate in control activities.

The project lays the foundations for a full acknowledgement of urban rodents' presence and activity in the most critical areas of Havana, the starting point to design and execute efficient control programs sustainable in time. It is important to point out that the aim is to put into practice control strategies considering macro and micro factors that have a bearing in the proliferation of rodents throughout the city.

The fight against the different species of rodents, the vector of numerous diseases, among which leptospirosis stands out, will be spread out in 384 blocks of Old Havana, a critical area that, in spite of the efforts made by Cuban authorities, has numerous houses with different degrees of deterioration and poor cleaning which constitute two of the most favorable conditions for rodents' reproduction.

The first phase of the program involves performing a diagnosis based on the assessment of rodent-favorable environmental variables in the area which are the results from surveys to the community aimed at identifying the socio-demographic profile of the inhabitants and their perception regarding the subject of rodents. Furthermore, it involves planting traps in different parts of the city aimed at knowing rodents' differential use of space.

Once the diagnosis phase is concluded, it will be possible to elaborate a risk stratification map to identify critical points and therefore act individually on each of them during the subsequent phase - that of the control of rodents.
Mundo Sano Foundation and Cuban Ministry of Health have an immediate collaboration antecedent - a project of similar characteristics that was developed in 2008 in the city of Matanzas, on the Northern coast of the island, 90 kilometers East of Havana. One year later, the decrease achieved in rodent population has been kept at satisfactory levels, and therefore, it has been decided to repeat the experience in the city of Havana.

Currently, it is widely documented that rats can transmit to human beings up to 243 different etiological agents. Most of them are the cause of pathologies with significant morbidity and mortality rates (bubonic plague, typhus, trichinosis, leptospirosis), while others cause subclinical manifestations of ambulatory evolution that create several economic losses due to absenteeism (salmonellosis, hymenolepiasis, ascaridiasis, giardiasis, and fever due to rat bite).