Word: pest
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...meeting late, edgy, and shaking. You have to excuse yourself to hit the bathroom because you've got a stomach bug and antibiotics just aren't helping. Not to mention the fleas that seem to be leaping from the carpet into your socks. Halfway through the meeting a pest-control guy steps in and sprays the room with a white fog that makes you retch...
...altering the very foundation on which the conservation movement was built. What good is a wildlife reserve if the protected animals can't live there, because climate change pushes them out? What difference does it make to defend trees from logging, if global warming will allow a new pest to ravage whole forests...
...million metric tons last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But prices are spiking for several reasons: rising long-term demand in countries such as China and India, where millions of increasingly prosperous people are eating more; short-term supply shocks thanks to unusually cold weather and pest infestation in Vietnam, the world's second largest supplier of rice; and the diversion of a huge chunk of America's corn crop to ethanol production, which has boosted demand for other staples, including rice...
...imported rice to feed their large populations. A November cyclone in Bangladesh ravaged the fall crop, destroying some 800,000 metric tons of rice and forcing the country to import an extra 2.4 million metric tons from India simply to stave off famine. In Vietnam, bad weather and pest outbreaks hurt harvests. In the Philippines, where some 68 million people live on less than $2 a day, the government recently urged restaurants to halve their portions of rice. Credit Suisse estimates a shortage could cost the Philippines up to 1% of GDP in 2008. Manila resident Evelyn Belo, who waited...
...Lacking vaccines or effective treatments, public-health officials are battling the disease with old-school tactics: pest control and education. But fumigation campaigns are too expensive for many Asian governments to carry out effectively; it's also difficult to regularly send out health officials to remind communities to keep their homes dry and water supplies clean. Even wealthy Singapore, a model of dengue control, was floored by an outbreak in 2005. Reported cases went down the following year, but are back up again slightly in 2007. "That's a kind of warning to us," says Hales. "As the temperature continues...