Erik van Straten<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mindly.social/@Angelaswf" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>Angelaswf</span></a></span> : sorry for a late response, but there were more cases like this. When I was young (6 - 12 years old, 1965 - 1971) I lived in Indonesia.</p><p>DDT was then used to kill mosquitos to prevent the spread of malaria. I personally recall cats dying because they ate birds who ate poisoned insects.</p><p>A search quickly returned <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2636426/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/</span><span class="invisible">PMC2636426/</span></a> (Borneo is now called Kalimantan):</p><p>❝<br>In the early 1950s, there was an outbreak of a serious disease called malaria among the Dayak people in Borneo. The World Health Organization tried to solve the problem. They sprayed large amounts of a chemical called DDT to kill the mosquitoes that carried the malaria. The mosquitoes died and there was less malaria. That was good. However, there were side effects. One of the first effects was that the roofs of people's houses began to fall down on their heads. It turned out that the DDT was also killing a parasitic wasp that ate thatch-eating caterpillars. Without the wasps to eat them, there were more and more thatch-eating caterpillars. Worse than that, the insects that died from being poisoned by DDT were eaten by gecko lizards, which were then eaten by cats. The cats started to die, the rats flourished, and the people were threatened by outbreaks of two new serious diseases carried by the rats, sylvatic plague and typhus. To cope with these problems, which it had itself created, the World Health Organization had to parachute live cats into Borneo. [36]<br>❞</p><p>[36] (dead link) President and Fellows of Harvard College, “Parachuting Cats Into Borneo,” 2002, available at <a href="http://pzweb.harvard.edu/ucp/curriculum/ecosystems/s6_res_borneo.pdf" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">http://</span><span class="ellipsis">pzweb.harvard.edu/ucp/curricul</span><span class="invisible">um/ecosystems/s6_res_borneo.pdf</span></a>, accessed March 21, 2007</p><p>We have not learned. In the Netherlands, when driving a car on a warm evening, the front window will not become "dirty" because of dead insects. Farmers have killed most of them using insecticides.</p><p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@ReneDamkot" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>ReneDamkot</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.energy/@AngelaScholder" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>AngelaScholder</span></a></span> </p><p><a href="https://infosec.exchange/tags/Insecticides" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Insecticides</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.exchange/tags/DDT" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DDT</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.exchange/tags/FoodChain" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FoodChain</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.exchange/tags/Poison" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Poison</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.exchange/tags/WHO" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WHO</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.exchange/tags/Indonesia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Indonesia</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.exchange/tags/Kalimantan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Kalimantan</span></a></p>