Posted on 03/22/2008 6:47:37 AM PDT by JACKRUSSELL
(BEIJING) - Reducing Beijing's rats, flies, mosquitoes and cockroaches has been placed "at the top of the agenda" by the city's pest-control experts to ensure no outbreaks during the Olympic Games, state media reported on Thursday.
Beijing was confident of preventing and controlling outbreaks of pests during the Games, having hired U.S. experts and set up a "citywide surveillance network", Zeng Xiaotong, a disease control official under China's Ministry of Health, told the China Daily.
"Since 2005, the Beijing Loving-Motherland Sanitation Movement Committee has called on sanitation workers and Beijing residents to kill pests and improve hygiene," Zeng said.
"These efforts have broadly paid off," he said.
Zeng said Beijing's major mosquito species was the same kind that caused a West Nile Virus outbreak that infected thousands of people and killed hundreds in the United States in 1999.
"For that we've invited experienced U.S. medical experts to Beijing to help with prevention work," he said.
China is regularly hit by outbreaks of rats and other crop-destroying rodents and often employs time-old remedies to control them.
In September, authorities set up over 1,000 eagle nests and released 200 foxes bred in captivity in its remote northwestern region Xinjiang to control a plague of plains rats.
Beijing's community-driven efforts to stamp out plague-carrying insects and rodents ahead of the Olympics have recalled the Mao Zedong-launched "Four Pests" campaign during the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s.
Pest control efforts included banging pots and pans to scare sparrows into flight and have them eventually drop to earth dead from exhaustion.
I’ve sent this story to the PETA headquarters, and am sure they’ll use their resources to relocate and “save” these species from man’s destruction.
What about the worst pests of all- the murderous commie leadership?
“Since 2005, the Berkeley Loving-Motherland Sanitation Movement Committee...”
The ChiComs, during their vaunted Great Step Backward, ordered their minions to eliminate all the sparrows, since the sparrows ate grain and, thanks to communism, everyone was starving. So the next year the crops were overrun by insects. Central planning at its best!
My dad, an old China hand, told this story many times.
Who ever thought that China would be a good venue for the Olympics anyway.....?????
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