This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher in Tagyatta.

Rats.

They're a defining feature of life in New York City, rustling in trash bags, scurrying

along the subway tracks, even becoming famous for occasionally eating pizza.

But these urban vermin may be less of a threat to human health than their smaller, cuter cousins, the city's mice.

They're in your buildings and they get into your kitchen cupboards and they get behind refrigerators.

And so they have a real potential to contaminate the environment that you actually live in.

Simon Williams is a microbiologist at Columbia University and the University of Western

Australia.

He and his colleagues trapped more than 400 mice in apartment building basements in

in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.

They took swabs of the mice's rear ends, gathered feces from the traps,

and subjected both to a battery of genetic tests.

The mice harbored an array of disease-causing bacteria like

Shigella, Clustridium difficil, Samanella. They also carried a suite of antibiotic

resistance genes and viruses associated with insects, dogs, chickens, and pigs.

Myce from a Chelsea apartment building had the most pig virus.

Perhaps the scientists say because they live near the meat packing district, which used to have pork processing facilities before fashionable nightclubs took over.

The details are in the journal MBIO.

The mere fact that these microbes can be found in poop though isn't cause for immediate alarm.

You know, we're not saying that these bugs are all out to get us, but we're just finding the genetic

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