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Drudge Retort: The Other Side of the News
Saturday, September 07, 2024

Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago and author of the new study, found that in U.S. counties where bat populations have been decimated by white-nose syndrome, human infant mortality rates rose by about 8 percent. That equates to 1,334 infant deaths between 2006 and 2017 that Frank says are attributable to a loss of bats.

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An interesting article...

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... Frank suggests the link is due to the positive impacts of bats' diets. A single bat consumes up to 40 percent of its body weight in insects every night. In agricultural areas, this means that when bats disappear, farmers might use more insecticides on their fields. In counties with outbreaks of white-nose syndrome, farmers used 31 percent more of these toxic chemicals, on average, per the study. Putting more insecticides into the environment seems to be the cause of the increased infant deaths, Frank writes.

To make sure his ideas stood up to scrutiny, Frank tells the Guardian's Rebekah White that he spent a year "kicking the tires" and ruling out other possible causes of infant mortality, like the opioid epidemic, parental unemployment, genetically modified crops and even the weather. Nothing else fit, showing "compelling evidence ... that farmers did respond to the decline in insect-eating bats, and that response had an adverse health impact on human infants," he adds. ...



#1 | Posted by LampLighter at 2024-09-06 09:28 PM | Reply

Life is a Web. Man is not Independent from nature and it's subtleties.

Tell Monsanto. And the RNC and DNC. Global Warming is Real too.

People are just too narrow and downright self destructive and stupid to survive.

#2 | Posted by Effeteposer at 2024-09-06 11:15 PM | Reply | Newsworthy 2

@#2 ... People are just too narrow and downright self destructive and stupid to survive. ...

How so?

#3 | Posted by LampLighter at 2024-09-06 11:28 PM | Reply

The cycle of life always ebbs and flows. Organisms become overpopulated and exhaust the resources of their environments. Or they fall prey to other organisms or external natural forces which have nothing to do with them. Nature always finds a balance in the end.

#4 | Posted by sentinel at 2024-09-07 09:57 PM | Reply | Funny: 1

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