- The DDT ban has killed more people in this world than Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin and all the Chinese dictators put together,
Posted on 08/27/2006 6:44:50 AM PDT by mathprof
Men in blue coveralls and white surgical masks began their annual trek into the countryside here last week. Methodically, they sprayed one home after another with a chemical most Americans probably thought disappeared from use long ago: DDT.
As villagers looked on, the workers doused inside and outside walls with a fine mist. It is a yearly effort to repel and kill mosquitoes that carry malaria - a disease that kills more than a million people a year, mostly children in sub-Saharan Africa.
Advertisement This small kingdom near South Africa is one of a handful of countries still using the pesticide, banned in the United States in 1972 because of its toxic effect on eagles and other wildlife.
But now DDT is poised for expansion in the developing world.
The influential World Health Organization plans to promote DDT as a cheap and effective tool against malaria. And the U.S. government has boosted its budget for malarial insecticide spraying in Africa twenty-fold, to $20 million next year.
The new push for household spraying reflects a growing belief in some quarters that significant progress on malaria will require a third major front, alongside insecticide-treated bed nets and novel anti-malarial drugs.
No one proposes a return to the widespread agricultural use that severely harmed ecosystems in the United States and Europe decades ago. The results of such spraying were famously depicted in Rachel Carson's landmark 1962 book Silent Spring, which launched the modern environmental movement.
Advocates of household spraying say the comparatively minute amounts used in homes pose no known dangers. Any potential risk, they say, is far outweighed by DDT's potency against malaria, as was seen in the late 1940s and '50s when it helped eradicate the disease in the United States and other industrialized nations.
But environmental groups...
(Excerpt) Read more at baltimoresun.com ...
"It would be no great loss to me if all the humans in the world died tomorrow".
The woman is a liar and a fraud. If she were committed to her insanity she would have committed suicide to rid the earth of one more trash talker. Any environmentalist wacko who is still alive is liar and a fraud.
DDT was used by families in Appalachia as a cure for intestinal worms and other internal parasites. It was taken by the spoonful by children. A manufacturer ate DDT by the spoonful to prove that it is harmless to animals. DDT was banned against legal and scientific opposition because the environmental movement demanded it. This was their proof that they could oppose even the most benign, harmless and important chemical and have it banned.
DDT was not banned because it was harmful. It was banned because it was and is the most important breakthrough in disease control and insect infestation in history with the least harmful effects.Tens of millions of children around the world have died because Rachael Carlson lied.
The raptors she claimed were harmed by DDT were in fact hunted nearly to extinction 25 years earlier and were making a comeback thanks in large measure to the positive effects of DDT. There was never any evidence of any kind that birds were harmed by DDT. Even the judge who heard the case claimed that DDT was never a culprit. Nevertheless the director of the CDC banned it to pander to the environmentalist lobby.
When it really matters what government does our Marxist fellow citizens lie through their teeth.
Michael Moore, a Margaret Mead or Rachel Carson, even a what's her name- that fake-suburban-housewife-actually-a-commie-journalist-who-wrote -Feminine-Mystique- Betty Friedan. Yeah, instead of creating "War of the World" radio broadcast-type hysteria, is now only fodder to keep the koolaiders or the ignorant (e.g., college students) under their intellecutal thumb.
Global warming is just their attempt to pull another Rachel Carson or Population Explosion myth and fear for them to grab power. I do hope the New Media is powerful enough to continue to stop the manipulation.
For example, if I hear Dick Morris say, once more time, that the far left is upset at Hilary's fake pro-Iraq war stance, which is only to dupe the mushy middle who still watches CBS/ABC/NBC, I think I will be sick. All the lefties know what a lefty she is, and will pretend to be upset, pull the lever for her, along with anyone they can dupe into believing she's a "moderate."
Sorry, I digress.
From Wikipedia:
DDT is a political chemical.
For all we know, you posted something put in there by Al GOre. I wouldn't believe Wikipedia about it if my life depended on it.
Come to think of it, millions of lives do.
Oops! Hitler is not in that table.
It was banned because of the incremental hysteria caused by the lies in Rachal Carson's book, "Silent Spring."
Better yet--ask her who would harvest the coffee and tea and serve her the Starbucks...
Cheers!
OK,I have no trouble accepting that.But am I correct to suspect that the vector of these diseases will,over time,develop a resistance to the DDT thus putting the people of various tropical regions right back where they started?
Posing that question is the closest I came to objecting to the use of DDT in malaria hot spots.
I always bought into it. Now i'm asking myself, why just the pelicans and not all the other birds?
hmmmm..
I have a set of short biographical readings in my classroom. Each is about 3 paragraphs long. One of the books had a section on Rachel Carson--I ripped it out and threw it away.
You are correct about that!
I've heard for years that constant exposure of a species to toxic chemicals will over time give advantage to a mutant strain that is resistant. I tend to believe this is probably true with respect to DDT since some species, namely us, aren't affected by the stuff.
So, I think regulated use that guards against reistance and environmental damge as opposed to the outright ban in place since 1972 would be a common sense approach to the issue.
Not in Iraq. We bought some insect killer because there was a wasps' nest somewhere behind the walls of our office and the huge things kept coming in and flying around. When we read the ingredients, we saw that it's 70% DDT.
Kills the heck out of those wasps.
And none of us have grown third arms or anything like that.
Well, not yet. ;-)
No, she just twisted 'facts' until they fit her personal agenda.
Just like certain FReepers tend to do.
Just waiting for the day. The way we build and protect wetlands here, it's only a matter of time before we can enjoy the same.
DDT isn't a chemical like bleach, which nothing can survive in. If it's in low enough concentrations, some of the targets will survive, and they will be the ones who can survive low concentrations. Then their children will mostly be able to survive that low concentration, and some of the children will even be able to survive stronger concentrations. It's exactly like antibiotic-resistant bacteria. You build up a tolerance in subsequent generations every time you don't wipe out an entire "crop".
Most of the findings these whack jobs came out with is bull.
They've caused more deaths in Africa than every KKK member would have if they'd taken a gun to all of Africa....
the libs are such phony baloney pseudo-intellectuals.
Malaria had practically disappeared from the U.S. well before DDT came into use; nobody seems to know why, and nobody can promise it won't come back.
As a child I lived in Norman, Oklahoma 1951-1955. A DDT fogger on the back of a jeep fogged all the streets on a weekly basis. We children used to run after the jeep within the DDT fog that it was being dispensed. We would follow it for blocks. A fogger of DDT was used at drive-in movie theaters, they fogged every row. I'm 61 now.
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