Posted on 02/01/2009 9:45:08 PM PST by george76
Insects can spread disease and destroy crops with devastating speed. Do not underestimate their potential as weapons.
Insects are one of the cheapest and most destructive weapons available to terrorists today, and one of the most widely ignored: they are easy to sneak across borders, reproduce quickly and can spread disease and destroy crops with devastating speed.
A great strategic lesson of 9/11 has been overlooked. Terrorists need only a little ingenuity, not sophisticated weapons, to cause enormous damage... Insects are the box-cutters of biological warfare - cheap, simple and wickedly effective.
Am I being an alarmist? I wish I knew. But I do know that few people have an inkling of how insects can - and have - been used to inflict human suffering and economic destruction.
insects have shaped human history. In the 14th century, 75million people succumbed to flea-borne bubonic plague. But few people realise that the Black Death arrived in Europe after the Mongols catapulted flea-ridden corpses into the port of Kaffa. People fled, carrying bacteria, rats and fleas throughout the Mediterranean.
And it was lice, not enemy armies, that nearly broke the back of the Soviet Union when typhus made 30million people ill and killed 5 million after the First World War.
Military strategists have seen the potential for warfare in all this...the Japanese military killed more than 400,000 Chinese by dropping plague-infected fleas and cholera-coated flies.
During the Cold War, the US military planned to produce 100million yellow fever-infected mosquitoes a month, and produced an “entomological warfare target analysis” of vulnerable sites in the Soviet Union and its allies' terrotories. The dispersal and biting capacity of (uninfected) mosquitoes was tested by secretly dropping them over US cities.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Remember the Breeders ?
As for insect warfare it is all alarmist, killer bees have only killed 50 or so people in the same number of years.
I would say it’s possible, but unlikely. I am much more concerned with biological agents,which, with the proper expertise can be done cheaply and effectively. Something along the lines of a bug that affects 25% of the population with a 10 or 20% mortality rate would effectively shut down the country. It doesn’t even have to be near that deadly, just deadly enough to induce fear.
> A little known fact of the black death is that the Jews were blamed for it because they didn’t get sick, because they followed the laws of the old testament, like quarantining the sick, washing in running water when coming in contact with the dead and sick and burying of human waste outside of town.
Once again demonstrating that “No Good Deed Shall Go Unpunished.”
Well I just moved into a house that is infested with of all things.....ladybugs!!!!!!! You cannot kill a ladybug, right?
It turns out that because ladybugs are so “good” for the environment that we started importing them from foreign places and that these new ladybugs like to live in your house in the winter and multiply, because they are not used to our climate.
It is all very irritating but it also make one wonder.....what country did these “foreign” ladybugs get imported from?
I think you mean Asian beetles here in Wisconsin come late September they are a huge pest and the entire winter you can here them rattling in between your blinds and windows. Not to mention what they do to crops.
No, I did research on this and was very surprised. I am in NW Washington State and my sister also had the same problem. She thought it was from the plants outside her windows.
These are definitely ladybugs and they are on the ceiling, on every lamp, like that. They may also be in the shutters but I see them wandering everywhere.
I did some reading and found the only effective way to get rid of them is with a vacuum cleaner. I would also try strips of fly paper and putting them in the brightest spot in your house/rooms. Then get some outdoor caulk and seal up any crack you can find which could be an entry way into your house.
Florida is the bug capital of the world. Just when you think you have seen all the bugs here, you see a new one. The lovebugs are floating copulating swarms of black bugs which get smashed into the windshields of your car every year. Then there are the grasshoppers which are ten times bigger than the ones up north. The roaches are huge and the spiders which build the basketball nets to catch them are gigantic. We have yellow flies twice a year, fire ants, stink bugs, and remember all those bees which are disappearing supposedly? Well, people find them by the thousands in bee hives down here. So many it hits the evening news.
bookmark bump
But I know it is nothing compared to what you have down in the everglades and we at least have the yearly freeze which kills every insect or drives them deep underground.
“...flea laden corpses catapulted over walls...”
Bull. When a mammal dies, human or animal, fleas abandon it because their food source, fresh blood, is gone.
Yes, use the vacuum. They will all go to the light in February, trying to get outside to lay their eggs. They are all pregnant females.
Three years ago, after vacuuming them for a couple of years, which can become exhausting in early October and again in February, when they first enter, then try to leave, I finally called an exterminator. He comes in late September, sprays inside and out in both our buildings. The first February afterward, there were maybe 40-50 of them to vacuum. By the third year, they still come inside after swarming, but they die and are easy to vacuum up. I only see 1-2 live ones in February, now.
We have had no ill effects. Our dog and cat are fine. Oh, and they don’t eat plants, they eat aphids. They were introduced by organic soybean farmers, from what I am told. Some may have come from infested pallets, but most were released on advice from the Extension Services plant biologists. They have no predators, because they taste bad. I have seen flocks of starlings watching them swarm and not one bird even attempts to eat one.
How was your super bowl party?
Thanks so much for your help. I appreciate it.
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