Rat-Repellent Bags: D.C.'s Solution or Idea Headed for the Trash?

The legions of rats that have forever scurried across the Earth have inspired no shortage of inventions promising to make them vanish.

There was the device that would fend them off with electromagnetic waves. Another would deter them with ultrasonic sound. There was even a human birth control pill that would make them sterile.

And now the garbage bag that purports to make rats flee.

The bag's inventor is a New York businessman hoping to promote it in the rat-happy environs otherwise known as Washington.

The businessman has hired a public relations firm to help spread the word about what it touts as a "state-of-the-art breakthrough," a bag that emits an odor so offensive to rats that it makes them run away.

Never mind that the agency that runs New York City's parks has passed on the bags after a trial run.

Or that a renowned rodent expert -- a veritable rat whisperer who has advised New York and District officials -- is more than skeptical.

Joseph Dussich, creator of the Repel-X trash bag, says he has found the answer to a riddle that has confounded humans since they first littered the landscape with half-eaten drumsticks, hamburgers, hot dogs, pizzas and whatever else adds up to a rat feast.

"This bag stops rats," Dussich boasted by phone from New York, where he's president of the JAD Corp. of America, which provides maintenance supplies to office and apartment buildings.

Dussich said he became a soldier in the rat wars after a client complained about a newspaper photo that showed children "in white Communion outfits" playing on a sidewalk, with a backdrop of six rats crawling over a mountain of garbage bags.

Dussich said he set out to teach himself "what rats don't like" and discovered that the list includes coyote urine.

"I wasn't about to make a garbage bag that smells like coyote urine -- that was out," he said. But he discovered that rats' ever-sensitive sinuses do not appreciate the mintlike odor of eucalyptus.