For many people, cockroaches are disgusting pests. For some, bugs are delicious fried snacks, and for others, they're medicine.
A Chinese farm is breeding 6 billion adult cockroaches a year for medical use and it's the first time in human history that 
many insects are bred and confined to an indoor space, said a report released this week by southern China's Hong Kong. Post (SCMP).
The company, run by Good Doctor, a pharmaceutical company in southwest China's Xichang city, has rows of shelves lined with open containers of food and water in a concrete building covering an area of about two football fields , according to the SCMP. It stays warm, humid and dark all year round, with an AI tracking system that monitors how individual cockroaches are growing.
Roach farming is a booming industry in China: Roach powder is patented by companies as an ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine and cosmetics that use insects as a cheap source of protein. There were about 100 large-scale cockroach farms in China in 2013, and farmers may have increased, reports the Los Angeles Times. In thethe Xichang facilities, the world's largest cockroach farm, the insects are converted into a liquid mixture for one million Chinese patients who use it for the treatment of respiratory tract, gastric disorders and other diseases with prescriptions.
Apparently, people who use this drug don't even know that it's made almost entirely from cockroaches, because Good Doctor only mentions the ingredient as Periplaneta americana, the scientific name for the American cockroach: reddish-brown insect that can fly when mature. . One patient told the SCMP: 'This is knowledge he would rather not have'
