Roaches

Cancel my plans to vacation in China!  According the Chinese media,  1.5 million cockroaches escaped a breeding facility in eastern China's Jiangsu province, infesting nearby farmland and homes. Oh, my...want to buy a cheap house? I bet real estate in  Juangsu is cheap now. Jiansu’s board of health investigators have no idea how to rid the region of the pests. You know what they say, nuke the world and the only survivors will be cockroaches. Here in cool climate Portland I rarely see roaches, but in my former New Orleans they were everywhere. We used to say that we could put a saddle on a New Orleans roach and ride him.

Maybe Jiangsu province should use their pest control on the guy who raised the 1.5 billion. That would at least prevent him from orchestrating a repeat performance  The roach breeder, Wang Pengsheng, began raising the insects so their extracts could be used as a traditional Chinese medicine treatment for cancer and inflammation, and to allegedly improve immunity. He had been raising the roaches on a diet of fruits and biscuits when something destroyed the plastic greenhouses he was using for the enterprise. Thank God he wasn't breeding any more of those Kardashian girls! I'll take a self respecting roach over a Kardashian any day.

Local villagers were reported to be worried that the escaped roaches would damage their crops and bring diseases. But Wang says he is a humanitarian as well as a blattaculturist (someone who breeds roaches) and that his roaches are not bad guys. I've known a few leeches in my time (most of them were relatives) but never a harmful roach. They may be disgusting to look at and invasive, but roaches never ask for money like the relatives did.  According to the  Chinese roach web site YinYangHouse.com, roach parts or extracts can renew “joints, sinews and bones, (heal) contusions, fractures and lacerations” and are also used for a “wide variety of blood stasis such as abdominal masses and amenorrhea, (as well as) numb and swollen tongue.”

That's probably wishful thinking, like using the horns of Rhinos to make sex better. But roaches do serve some known useful purposes.  As part of the food chain, cockroaches are a food source for birds and some other animals. Roaches also feed on other (some even more disgusting) creatures. They also recycle dying vegetation. So, it might be better if we both traded or relatives for some of those Chinese cockroaches.