MANKIND’S GREATEST MENACE.

Taranaki Daily News, 7 January 1921, Page 2

MANKIND’S GREATEST MENACE.

WILL INSECTS DRIVE HUMAN LIFE FROM THE EARTH? It has been predicted by Sir Harry Johnston that a time may come when life in this world will be a contest between man and insect. Many things are less probable, because already those low organisms constitute a menace to the entire human raceEvery crop has its particular insect pest In 1882 the Kentish hop growers were despoiled of £2,250,G00 by the aphis. A few years ago the item sawfly destroyed in Japan crops worth £15,000,000. The Colorado 'beetle has made still greater havoc amoi g the potato crops of America. Before the farmers there discovered its little ways they lost tubers worth at least £30,000,000. and the fight they are still waging against it costs them £500,000 a year. One of the worst pests of this class is the phylloxera, a tiny insect which preys on the grape vine. Cultivators in France lost £400,000,000 through it. PESTS THAT SPREAD PLAGUES. Such vast depredations are not confined to food crops; they extend to nearly every kind of plant. In. one year, for instance, the cotton crons in nine States of America were damaged by the weevil to the extent of £ 0.000,000. There are also insects w’th a more catholic taste —ravenous creatures that lay waste untold acres. Chief of these arc locusts, which sometimes move in such masses that they darken the sky and even stop trains. Locomotives have run into the hordes, and it has taken three or four hours to get them in motion againThough every man’s hand is raised against these pests, in twelve months they clear the crops off about 7,000.000 acres, doing damage to the amount of ©ver £20,000,000. In addition to crop pests there are many insects which prey on stock, such, for instance, as the blowfly, the cause of great losses in Australia. It deposits eggs in the wool of sheep, and the grubs hatched from these are provided with formidable mouth hooks, which tear the flesh of their bearers. In 1912 breeders in New South Wales thus lost £1,000,000, and those in Queensland about twice as much. Since then the pest has increased. Yet it is not the material loss, it is the loss of human life caused by insects that is the really disquietening feature in the perennial war. For the pests spread disease over whole continents, and are, in some cases, the prime factors in producing certain of the mosi terrible plagues known to medical science.

Malaria i» disseminated by the mosquito, which, contrary to popular belief, is not unknown in this country; enteric, typhoid, cholera, dysentery, ophthalmia, etc., are carried by the common house fly; and typhus, trench fever, the plague, scarlet fever, etc., are disseminated by vermin which are also believed to carry the organism causing rheumatic fever.

Sleeping sickness, most dreaded of all insect-borne diseases, is spread by the tsetse fly. In a large area of Uganda this insect fought against man with such persistency that the natives had to be evacuated from it. Upon the mastering of the deadly fly depends the development of Equatorial Africa, just as the completion of the Panama Canal developed on the extermination of the mosquito along the course from ocean to ocean.

In the next great war between nations one of the belligerents may enlist insects to spread a new disease is enemy country. A still more terrible possibility is that such a disease may, without being started by man, wipe out the human race, leaving the conquering insects in undisputed possession of our planet.