A Free Market Approach to Improving Human Health

In USA, cockroaches (also known as politicians) built a giant website to improve the health of the people. The website costs at least $600 million, contains 500 million lines of code and often fails to work.

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That led us to look for what other parts of the world are doing, and we came across an innovative way to improve health in one of the free-est economies, namely China.

LA Times reports -

Cockroach farms multiplying in China

The 43-year-old businessman is the largest cockroach producer in China (and thus probably in the world), with six farms populated by an estimated 10 million cockroaches. He sells them to producers of Asian medicine and to cosmetic companies that value the insects as a cheap source of protein as well as for the cellulose-like substance on their wings.

Even when they are breeding cockroaches, they show respect to American brands more than other ones :)

The favored breed for this purpose is the Periplaneta americana, or American cockroach, a reddish-brown insect that grows to about 1.6 inches long and, when mature, can fly, as opposed to the smaller, darker, wingless German cockroach.

On rare occasions, some cockroaches desert the farm to enjoy the outside world. For example, this year -

At least one million cockroaches have escaped a farm in China where they were being bred for use in traditional medicine, a report said.

The cockroaches fled the facility in Dafeng, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, for surrounding cornfields earlier this month after an “unknown perpetrator” destroyed the plastic greenhouse where they were raised, the Modern Express newspaper said.

Cockroach or website, which medicine will you take?