Seems to be a case of pseudo science! This research seems to be driven by ideological goals and personal preferences of the scientist and not by science!
I have serious doubts that this study would pass scrutiny! We are talking here about 121 infant deaths per year across the entire U.S. between 2006-2017. The author did not explicitly rule out e.g. if there were any serious child disease epidemics during this 11 year period that may have caused excessive deaths etc. On average there were 70 million children total per year during this period. Infant mortality is roughly 20 thousand per year in 2022.
"A “groundbreaking” study showing the connection between bats’ decline in the U.S. and infant mortality is the latest to demonstrate the stark toll of imbalanced ecosystems.
According to the research, published last week in Science, a decline in bat populations due to a fungal disease led farmers in 245 counties to increase their use of insecticides by 31% to combat an increase in insect activity.
In those same counties, infant mortality rose by ~8%—accounting for 1,334 infant deaths—from 2006 to 2017. ..."
From the editor's summary and abstract:
"Editor’s summary
White-nose syndrome has caused declines in bat species across North America. Because bats typically prey on agricultural insect pests, this decline can be treated as a natural experiment to quantify the costs associated with the loss of an important ecosystem service. Frank used quasi-experimental methods to investigate how insecticide use can compensate for the loss of natural pest control from bats by considering both the economic and health costs of insecticides (see the Policy Forum by Larsen et al.). County-level insecticide use and infant mortality due to internal causes both increased after the emergence of white-nose syndrome, whereas farms’ crop revenue decreased. This study provides an example of how biodiversity loss affects human well-being and presents observational methods for quantifying those costs.
Structured Abstract
INTRODUCTION
... Specifically, I use the sudden emergence of a deadly wildlife disease in insect-eating bats—known as white-nose syndrome—to quantify the benefits from their provision of biological pest control. I validate previous theoretical predictions that farmers respond by substituting bats with insecticides; however, because those are toxic compounds, by design, this substitution leads to higher human infant mortality rates in the areas affected by the bat die-offs.
RATIONALE
...
RESULTS
I used annual data at the county level on insecticide use and estimated that after the onset of bat die-offs, farmers in the county increase their insecticide use by 31.1%, on average. This demonstrates the substitution between a declining natural input and a human-made input—providing the first empirical validation of a fundamental theoretical prediction in environmental economics. I proceeded to document that infant mortality rates due to internal causes of death (i.e., not due to accidents or homicides) increased by 7.9%, on average, in the affected counties. This result highlights that real-world use levels of insecticides have a detrimental impact on health, even when used within regulatory limits, which highlights the difficulties of assessing the public health impacts of pesticides when regulating them individually.
The staggered expansion of the wildlife disease supports the causal interpretation of the results. Any additional alternative explanation would need to change along the expansion path of the wildlife disease around the same timing of its expansion. In additional analyses, I demonstrate that changes in crop composition, in other types of mortality, or in economic conditions fail to explain the observed results, even when controlling for fine-scaled and flexible time trends.
CONCLUSION
These findings help validate previous theoretical predictions regarding well-functioning ecosystems, where interactions between natural enemies—insect-eating bats and crop pests—allow farmers to use lower amounts of toxic substitutes. Not only are these results informative about natural enemy interactions generally, and biological pest control more specifically, they also highlight the direct agricultural and health benefits that bats provide. ...
Improving our understanding of how changes in biodiversity affect human well-being will be important when designing and implementing conservation policies. These findings inform ongoing efforts, such as pursuing the ambitious goal to place 30% of land and marine areas under protection by 2030, and highlight the importance of continued monitoring of biodiversity levels, as in the assessments released by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services."
The economic impacts of ecosystem disruptions: Costs from substituting biological pest control (no public access)
Schematic framework linking the ecosystem and human health as being intermediated by the agricultural system.
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