Beetle attack

Press, 19 May 1984, Page 11

Beetle attack

NZPA-AP Valente The small town of Valente in north-eastern Brazil is under a mysterious and unprecedented attack of flying beetles. “They’re all over the place—in people’s beds, in water pipes and on the sidewalks,” Dr Jurandyr Lopes Carneiro of the local hospital in Valente, 1930 km north-east of Rio de Janeiro, said in a telephone interview yesterday.

“The beetles have been here for about three weeks,” he said.

“We got rid of some of them by turning off all the public street lights, but it’s

still an enormous problem.”

The Brazilian wire service A.J.B. speculated that the beetles had proliferated because a recent prolonged drought in the north eastern part of the country had killed off large numbers of toads, the bugs’ natural predators.

“Veja Magazine,” Brazil’s most widely circulated newsweekly, said the beetle attack was reminiscent of the Alfred Hitchcock film, “The Birds.” “But this was even more repugnant,” the magazine said. “The beetles give off a terrible smell.”