Posted on 08/08/2002 5:55:56 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
It has taken a scant three-and-a-half years since West Nile Fever made its appearance in New York, eventually spreading to states west of the Mississippi River. It has now killed five people in Louisiana and a state of emergency has been declared to fight it with widespread spraying of insecticide.
Julie Gerberding, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, "Officials should spray for mosquitoes as much as possible," and she said people shouldn't worry about a health threat from pesticides being used to kill mosquitoes.
"There are very, very few if any health consequences," Gerberding said. "Basically they're safe and the risks they present are outweighed by the benefits of reducing the mosquito population."
The one insecticide not available is DDT, banned on June 30, 1972 by then-EPA director William Ruckelshouse without a scintilla of scientific evidence to support its loss.
Here's the scary part: Behind closed doors, the American Mosquito Control Association fears this nation will lose virtually all of the insecticides still available to defend people against the new plague of West Nile Fever and the return of malaria to the U.S. Will Yellow Fever return as well?
You can blame the environmentalists for this, and you can lay the deaths from West Nile Fever at their doorstep. You can blame their icon, Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring , for misusing data to make her case against DDT. She is personally responsible for the needless deaths of millions of people around the world.
You can blame the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which ignored the findings of hearings held in 1971-72. Those hearings concluded, after seven months and 9,000 pages of testimony, that "DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man...DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard...The use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife."
The Greens are never deterred by facts. Their goal is to reduce the Earth's human population in order to "protect" and "save" it.
How bad is the toll of malaria in the world today? Harvard University's Amir Attaran offered the following comparison. "Imagine seven jumbo jets, each packed with women and children, crashing into the ground every day, day after day, year after year, adding up to more than two million deaths a year. Now imagine that many, if not most, of those deaths could have been prevented with limited use of DDT..."
Malaria, spread by mosquitoes in the same fashion as West Nile Fever, is contracted by 300 to 500 million people very year. And every year, at least two million die from it, mostly pregnant women and children under the age of five.
Now the question is this: How many more Americans will have to die from West Nile Fever before the EPA reverses its ban on DDT and permits its use to defend people against a new disease sweeping across the nation?
The "unintended consequences" of environmentalism are killing people and will continue to do so until their lies are buried along with their victims.
(Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, "Warning Signs," posted on the web site of The National Anxiety Center, a clearinghouse for information about scare campaigns.)
Alan Caruba
A dead crow has already been found this year not far from the arboretum.
Expect some more because of the many ponds which were put in for drainage control in the area (cheaper than piping it).
When someone dies in our town, they might get the hint.
Our forefathers knew that draining the swamps and making "water flow" helped to alleviate the diseases asscoiated with harboring these "mosquito havens".
Sac
Many nutty ides are carried along in this swing in both directions. We have learned both ways, and the thoughtless knee-jerkism that many in public have regarding environmental issues has to be broken down and cast off. We need to engender a return of a high regard for private property and the return the concepts of liberty in assumptions of reasonable use by reasonable people by removing mountains of arcane, petty and cumbersome regulations.
From what I've read of it, the chances of it spreading naturally from Africa to the US are astronomical.
Good article. But I do have a slight problem with the above statement made in the article. At that rate it should take only 4 or 5 years for the whole world to be infected with Malaria. Or should we all have gotten malaria by now?
Reproduction of the malaria parasite is controlled by temperature. Large areas of the United States are out of the effective range of the parasite (which is why it's primarily considered a tropical disease, even though it was also a problem in the early years of the United States).
Quick Web search found this information from the South African malaria control page:
"Temperature has a profound influence on the developmental cycle of the malaria parasites. The body temperature of the mosquitoes is directly related to the environmental temperature. Malaria parasites cease to develop in the mosquito when the temperature is below 16ºC. P. falciparum sporozoites can only develop at temperatures above 18ºC. The best conditions for the development of Plasmodia in the Anopheles and the transmission of the infection are when the mean temperature is within the range 20-30ºC."
20-30 C = 68-86 F.
This may help (PDF document):
Balancing risks of DDT and malaria in the Global POPS Treaty
DDT use is banned in the U.S., where malaria is an insignificant problem. It is still used in countries around the world for mosquito control.
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