When I moved to New York City several years ago I developed a cough. It was obvious that the air pollution was challenging my naïve lungs. After a few years of coughing, this annoying consequence of Manhattan’s ‘high density construction’ and periodic traffic gridlock subsided. My lungs had surrendered to the daily assault from toxic petrochemicals. Unlike some adults living in the city, I did not succumb to lethal respiratory diseases, like asthma and emphysema. A seventeen-year-old fellow from the neighborhood who occasionally ran errands for me died during an acute asthma attack. This was at about the same time that the Superintendent of Police for New York City, Benjamin Ward, also died from an acute asthmatic attack. The city’s poisonous air did not discriminate on the basis of age (Ward was 75) or race (my messenger was white, and Ward was black).
The population filling the emergency rooms throughout the year did reveal a special vulnerability in one group: the youngest children in the poorest families. Of course, this group had already been weakened by the unpredictable and unreliable living conditions in what New York City laughingly referred to as ‘affordable housing.’ Much of this housing was owned and mismanaged by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), better known for its often-failed heating systems, broken elevators, and rodent infestations than for its delivery of services to its customers.
As we hear the drumbeat of ‘affordable’ and ‘high density’ housing approaching our humble village, we need only look a few dozen miles to the west to see what the future will hold. It would be wise to consider the obvious causes of the toxic environment in Gotham. Aside from the millions of gallons of lead-based paint still adorning the older and less expensive apartments across the five boroughs of New York City and the thousands of gallons of liquid mercury (still sold at many corner stores in the city) spilled on the floors of innumerable apartments as part of religious practices, the less affluent residents of the city are breathing an atmosphere that even the Marlboro man would have found suffocating. The wealthy have the Hamptons or yachts to help them clear their lungs. The rest of us need to wear surgical masks.
The less densely packed towns, like Easton, have been spared this toxic atmosphere but there are signs that this is changing. Dead canaries were the tip-off in much of the early twentieth century that the air in mines was poisonous. Today’s harbingers of toxic air in our future are the bats.
Bats are amongst the most under-appreciated of our local wild-life. Although they appear menacing, they have no interest in the humans encroaching upon their homelands. They do not suck blood from unsuspecting sleepers, but they do eat bugs, literally tons of bugs, including those that do bite us or produce larvae that damage crops. A bat routinely catches and eats a thousand insects during its nocturnal feast. Each mosquito a bat eats reduces our risk of developing West Nile disease or Eastern Equine Encephalitis or any other potentially fatal infections. It also eliminates crop-devastating insect larvae.
A much more rarely mentioned benefit of bats is that they reduce the need for insecticides to protect crops from voracious insects. Unfortunately, our bats are sick. What made them sick is debatable but only because there are so many possible causes for their morbidity. It could be the chemicals belching into the air they breathe along with us. It could be a consequence of global warming. It is probably a combination of factors disrupting the fine balance in our ecosystem that has allowed them to thrive for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. One need not look far or beyond the usual suspects to identify reasons for their demise.
The most obvious and immediate cause of the bat decline is an infectious disease against which the bats appear to have no resistance. This disease is characterized by a white fungus accumulating about the bat nose and is consequently known as white nose syndrome. It came from New York state (of course) and is decimating bat colonies in Connecticut. With the loss of our bat guardians, insect populations have swelled, and farmers have responded by applying more insecticides to protect their crops. These chemical poisons are saving crops, but as with many changes in our ecosystem, there have been unintended consequences.
The most disturbing of these consequences has been an otherwise inexplicable increase in illnesses and deaths amongst newborn human babies. Regions depleted of bats, in which increased pesticide use has been adopted to compensate for the increased insect burden, have substantially higher rates of infant mortality than were evident before the bat population collapse. Some studies have found that areas in which white nose syndrome decimated the resident bat population experienced as much as an 8 percent increase in infant mortality.
This is a domino effect. Environmental changes allow the emergence or spread of a previously rare or nonexistent disease amongst bats. The decline in bat numbers allows for a rapid expansion of agricultural pests. Farmers compensate for crop damage by applying more (expensive) pesticides. Agricultural communities, like our own, are exposed to high doses of toxic chemicals, and the most vulnerable members of our communities, the newborns, are those most challenged by this change in the environment.
The ecosystem we live in and depend upon is fragile. Bats had been an important part of that ecosystem long before our ancestors left the Rift Valley in Africa and started disrupting the fine balance in Nature that had evolved over millions of years. We need to save the bats, not just for the farmers dealing with exploding insect populations, but also for the health and welfare of our own species.
Dr. Lechtenberg is an Easton resident who graduated from Tufts University and Tufts Medical School in Massachusetts and subsequently trained at The Mount Sinai Hospital and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. He worked as a neurologist at several New York Hospitals, including Kings County and The Long Island College Hospital, while maintaining a private practice, teaching at SUNY Downstate Medical School, and publishing 15 books on a variety of medical topics. He worked in drug development in the U.S., as well as in England, Germany, and France.
