Consider the chemical war on mosquitoes. Mosquito has been the vector of so many diseases including malaria and dengue that it makes one wonder whether we are capable of winning this battle with the mosquito. This little pest has probably killed more humans than all wars combined and yet we have not been able to solve this problem.
However, most of our war against the mosquito has been a chemical warfare. We come up against it with DDT, other toxic chemicals, fumes, oils to coat the developing eggs while at the other hand coming up with chemicals to coat our body – DEET and other strong odors to prevent them from biting us.
It has not worked.
The war on insect pests has been rarely won by chemicals. However, there might be other ways to solve this problem. In the 1950’s scientists used a technique called the sterile insect technique. Since insects have a male and a female species and they both are required to produce an offspring, making one of them sterile effectively makes them unable to reproduce. This was done through radiating the insects and then releasing them into the wild. When these mated with the normal wild insects, no progeny were born and the population was controlled. This has been a successful approach to control screwworm fly, tsetse fly. Recently, one company in the UK, Oxitec, seems to have been using a strategy that is unique. Make the male sterile using genetic engineering techniques.
Maybe for many of the areas that we use chemicals to alter our physiology, there are other ways to control it without the use of biologics or small molecules. Our ingenuity to creative problem solving might lead us to the answer that are better than suggesting loosely defined lifestyle changes work for all cardiovascular diseases!