"Quote:
Roaches have been found to carry polio, hepatitis, salmonella, streptococcus, shigella, hookworms, tapeworms, dysentery-causing amoebi, leprosy and bubonic plague. Even a squeaky-clean cockroach can make you sick (or kill you) if you happen to be allergic: Roaches are the prime culprits in the inner-city asthma epidemic that takes the lives of hundreds of children each year."

Although I wouldn't touch the filthy things today, we fished with them when I was growing up. Bream would go crazy attacking them. We never used crickets unless we ran out of roaches. We also had a bait shop in our garage that funded my college education. What was really interesting was that we sold crickets, worms and black roaches. The crickets brought $1 per hundred and the roaches sold for $1.50 per hundred. We couldn't catch enough roaches to satisfy the demand. I can't count the times we set out our roach traps at night and picked them up before dawn in an old alley beside a football stadium. We would sometimes catch 2000 - 3000 and sell all of them within a few days. I'm 58 years old and really healthy (as far as I know) so maybe those black roaches that hung around those garbage cans were healthier than the cockroaches.

Hint for anyone catching their own these days: put a slice of white bread in the bottom of the roach traps (ours looked exactly like the ones someone posted on this board) and soak the bread with beer. The beer soaked bread would catch twice as many or more than the traps with the non-alcoholic bread.

Dan