Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Man and insects
- 2 The causes of pest and vectored disease outbreaks
- 3 Insecticides and their formulation
- 4 Application of insecticides
- 5 Problems with insecticides
- 6 Environmental/cultural control
- 7 Biological control
- 8 Insect pathogens
- 9 Genetic control
- 10 Pheromones
- 11 Plant and host resistance
- 12 Other control measures and related topics
- 13 Pest and vector management
- Appendix of names of some chemicals and microbials used as pesticides
- References
- Index
1 - Man and insects
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Man and insects
- 2 The causes of pest and vectored disease outbreaks
- 3 Insecticides and their formulation
- 4 Application of insecticides
- 5 Problems with insecticides
- 6 Environmental/cultural control
- 7 Biological control
- 8 Insect pathogens
- 9 Genetic control
- 10 Pheromones
- 11 Plant and host resistance
- 12 Other control measures and related topics
- 13 Pest and vector management
- Appendix of names of some chemicals and microbials used as pesticides
- References
- Index
Summary
Impact on man
Certain insects, such as flies, lice and locusts have been associated with ill health of humans, sickness in domesticated animals and crop losses from pre-biblical times. However, since man was a hunter-gatherer long before he took up farming, his first experience of insect problems must have been with being bitten by them. A much-quoted biblical passage describes the plague of flies the Lord is said to have despatched to Egypt which entered the house of Pharaoh (Exodus). In spite of this long association, connections between biting insects and disease took many centuries to be made, whereas the depredations of insects on crops were largely instantly recognizable. The eccentric physician Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, came very close to guessing the truth that lice transmitted typhus, but it was only during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that insects such as mosquitoes were identified as vectors of malaria, yellow fever and other infections, that tsetse flies transmitted sleeping sickness and animal trypanosomiasis, and that ticks spread various infections, such as so-called Texas fever, to cattle (Table 1.1). Similarly the first proof that an insect (the honey bee) transmitted a disease of plants (fireblight) was not obtained until 1892. Although the pace of vector incrimination has slowed down, more recent discoveries have identified ticks as vectors of the spirochaetal organisms causing Lyme disease in humans.
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- Information
- Pest and Vector Control , pp. 1 - 30Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004