Suppose that over the next year the entire population of the Memphis metropolitan area were to die: 2,700-plus people gone each and every day, over a million in a year. And further imagine that another 200 million-plus, more than half the population of the entire U.S., were made chronically ill and, in a majority of those cases, unable to work...Then consider that it was all caused by a disease that could have been eliminated through use of a common, cheap chemical, but the government refused to allow it, even though no scientific evidence had ever shown it to have caused harm to humans....Pandering to Politics Costs Lives, Hembree Brandon, Delta Farm Press
Sadly, this catastrophe of good intentions didn't originate with a Democrat, but with William Ruckelshaus, Richard Nixon's EPA Administrator, who bowed to a storm begun by Rachel Carson's somewhat Biblical Silent Spring, a book whose conclusions about DDT have been roundly trashed for their inaccuracy for decades. And each decade has brought ten to thirty million dead from malaria worldwide. Malaria is easily preventable by using DDT to kill tsetse flies, which carry the disease (as they carry West Nile in the Gowanus Canal in New York City), a chemical which has never been proven harmful to human beings, though it may cause modest thinning of bird egg shells.
How many people and how much wealth will the Greens' fake religion cost us before we tell them to go to the Hell they would consign us to for making decisions based on fact instead of hysteria?
Luther
3 comments:
Yes but you forget those ten to thirty million dead people weren't white, rich and living in Scarsdale.
Ufonzo
The "DDT ban myth" has become widespread in conservative circles on the internet but has little basis in fact. DDT was banned in the U.S. (where malaria was already eradicated) by Ruckelshaus but it has not been banned worldwide. When the international treaty on persistent organic pollutants (POP) was being negotiated a few years ago, the World Wildlife Fund was initially pushing for a date to be set for an eventual phase-out in the use of DDT against malaria (arguing that having such a date was the most effective way to provide the necessary incentive for the development of good alternatives to DDT); however, even WWF backed off this negotiating position and the final treaty has no such date, allowing the use of DDT for disease control (but not for agriculture).
So, why has malaria come back with such a vengeance in some parts of the world? The story is a complex one involving lack of international funding, unstable and ineffective governments, very little funds devoted by pharmaceutical companies to a disease that affects the poor, but perhaps most importantly natural selection of the mosquitoes that transmit malaria (which is not, by the way, transmitted by the tsetse fly). In particular, the mosquitoes have developed resistance to DDT and other pesticides and also to the anti-malarial drugs.
The reason for this development of resistance was in fact the widespread and indiscriminate use of DDT in agriculture. When DDT is used against malaria, it is used in small quantities for indoor spraying and is much less harmful to the environment and is less apt to lead to mosquitoes becoming resistant.
Unfortunately, however, in many places the mosqitoes are resistant because of DDT's once widespread and indiscriminate use. This is why, for example, malaria skyrocketed in India in the 1970s even as the use of DDT was continuing to increase. This issue with resistance is why the Malaria Foundation International, which fought to keep DDT use legal in the POP treaty, says: "The outcome of the treaty is arguably better than the status quo going into the negotiations over two years ago. For the first time, there is now an insecticide which is restricted to vector control only, meaning that the selection of resistant mosquitoes will be slower than before." ( http://www.malaria.org/DDTpage.html )
For further info, see http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/ddt/ or http://info-pollution.com/ddtban.htm
Dear Joel (if that's your real name),
We always try to deal with folks graciously here. But I've gone to the trouble of tracing your links, and, as I suspected, the trail of your information sourcing, after a few twists and turns, leads, ultimately, to the Tides Center, a leftist advocacy group that's been the recipient of major donations by Teresa Heinz Kerry. Tides is set up as a "charity" so it doesn't have to out the subgroups whose leftist political activities it funds, very probably in violation of IRS rules governing the use of funds by such organizations.
Your arguments, derived from postings at a lefty advocacy site run by a fellow who calls himself "Jim Norton" are nice, but ignore or simply dismiss compelling counter arguments. "Jim" is just channeling the propaganda he wants to feed, but is pretty sneaky the way he links to one or two rightie sources to cloak his tactics.
But as I've indicated in a post now up, and as you well know, science is not your point here. It's advocacy politics. Luther and I are onto this stuff and will continue to expose the propaganda and mythology that's put out by your side disguised as science.
What you're doing here on our blog is what Rush Limbaugh calls "seminar calling," an concerted attempt by one or more lefty individuals to exploit the wide listenership and readership of conservative radio shows, commentaries, and blogs to subvert them and to promote leftist points of view--essentially parasitizing the sites, programs, or blogs they find threatening.
I'd suggest you find someone else to propagandize. You won't get to first base with either of us or with our increasing base of intelligent and skeptical readers.
--W
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