Interactions with Mankind

Interactions with mankind. Cockroaches interact with human life in several ways, most of them harmful:

1. They damage household materials — clothes, shoes, paper and similar items — by feeding on them, and they also eat and spoil stored food.
2. They contaminate whatever food they touch, leaving behind a characteristic unpleasant smell that makes the food unfit to eat.
3. Because they habitually live in sewage pipes and gutters, they pick up and carry harmful pathogens on their bodies, spreading diseases such as cholera, diarrhoea, tuberculosis and typhoid.
4. Despite the harm they cause, cockroaches also have a place in the food chain — many amphibians, birds, lizards and rodents prey on them, and in some regions (parts of South America, China and Myanmar) certain communities even eat cockroaches themselves.
5. Because they are easy to obtain without disturbing natural ecological balance, cockroaches are widely used as experimental/laboratory animals for biological research and dissection-based study — which is exactly why this chapter uses the cockroach as its representative animal type.

Control measures. Since cockroaches are considered economically harmful, they need to be controlled sensibly: …