Parachuting Cats
In Borneo in the early 1950s, the World Health Organization
(WHO) was faced with the problem of Malaria.
They found an answer that was short and simple… and wrong! They sprayed DDT throughout the area, killing
the mosquitoes that carry the disease. As
the mosquito population declined, the incidence of malaria declined. Everyone declared the program a success!
Soon, they had a new problem; the roofs of houses were
collapsing. It seems that the DDT had
also killed wasps. The wasps had been
eating caterpillars. Without the wasps,
the caterpillars proliferated. And they
ate the thatch on the roofs, so the roofs collapsed!
Yet, the WHO found it also had a worse problem: the DDT was
now in the food chain. Geckos ate the
poisoned insects and cats ate the geckos.
When the cats died, rats flourished.
The WHO was now faced with an outbreak of rat-borne diseases, sylvatic
plague and typhus, which it created itself!
The solution was to PARACHUTE CATS into Borneo!
The lesson? The cause
of problems could be solutions to other problems that were not thought through
well enough. All things interact, often
in ways we don’t understand. But at the
same time, if we understand interactions better, our solutions will go further
than we might initially have thought.
The solutions can then beget even more solutions, not problems.
“More than 2 million Americans
become seriously ill every year from toxic reaction to correctly prescribed
medications taken properly, and 106,000+ die from those reactions.”
Journal
of the American Medical Association
“The solution to good health lies in eliminating interference from the
body, not creating it.”
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