In response to the Queensland fruit fly outbreak, the Ventura County agricultural commissioner, Korrine Bell, told reporters that California was “facing an agricultural crisis.” She urged residents: “Please, don’t pack a pest.” The Mediterranean fruit fly is among the most undiscerning, and therefore, destructive — it has made its home inside more than 250 kinds […]
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The owners were convinced they had been infested by bedbugs again. They stripped their house of every piece of clothing, every last picture frame, every book and children’s toy where a bedbug might hide and stuffed it all inside garbage bags to be stored outside, in a tent in their back yard in a village […]
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Along hundreds of miles of Lake Victoria’s shoreline in Kenya, a squadron of young scientists and an army of volunteers are waging an all-out war on a creature that threatens the health of more people than any other on earth: the mosquito. They are testing new insecticides and ingenious new ways to deliver them. They […]
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The narrow wooden benches in the student health clinic at Dire Dawa University in Ethiopia’s second-largest city began to fill up in March last year: feverish students slumped against their friends, cradling aching heads in their hands. Helen Asaminew, the presiding nurse, was baffled. The students had the hallmark symptoms of malaria. But people didn’t […]
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Call it a win for the little species, though all kinds of endangered animals and plants stand to benefit. A sweeping legal settlement approved this week has put the Environmental Protection Agency on a binding path to do something it has barely done before, by its own acknowledgment: Adequately consider the effects on imperiled species […]
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