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A case of malaria has been confirmed in Arkansas and is the first locally acquired case in the state in at least 40 years. The patient, who was not named, lives in Saline County and had not recently traveled out of the country. The case makes Arkansas the fourth state to report a locally acquired case of the disease this year, in another sign the disease may be gaining a foothold in the US for the first time in two decades. The patient was also the tenth to be infected on US soil this year, after seven locally-acquired infections were...

The publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 sent shock waves through state agencies. The following year, in 1963, the Arkansas branch of the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife (which later became the US Fish and Wildlife Service) imported grass carp as an organic treatment for catfish ponds. Carp, with their voracious appetites for plankton, were a chemical-free filter. When the approach proved successful, additional species — black, silver, and bighead carp — were brought from Vietnam and Malaysia, and later from China and Russia as well. Without differentiating among the species, agencies like the US Department of...

...just how bad is the situation? Our new paper shows the outlook for life on Earth is more dire than is generally understood.The research published today reviews more than 150 studies to produce a stark summary of the state of the natural world...Our paper was authored by 17 leading scientists... While the problems are too numerous to cover in full here, they include:a halving of vegetation biomass since the agricultural revolution around 11,000 years ago...about 1,300 documented species extinctions over the past 500 years, with many more unrecorded... Read more: What is a 'mass extinction' and are we in one...

On Jan. 24, 2017, PBS aired a two-hour special on Rachel Carson, the mother of the environmental movement. Although the program crossed the line from biography to hagiography, in Carson’s case, the unbridled praise was well deserved – with one exception. Rachel Carson was an American hero. In the early 1960s, she was the first to warn that a pesticide called DDT could accumulate in the environment, the first to show that it could harm fish, birds, and other wildlife, the first to warn that its overuse would render it ineffective, and the first to predict that more natural means...

We've been told conservatives don't believe in science and that there's a "Republican war on science." But John Tierney, who's written about science for The New York Times for 25 years and now writes for the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, told me in my latest online video, "The real war on science is the one from the left." Really? Conservatives are more likely to be creationists -- denying evolution. "Right," says Tierney. "But creationism doesn't affect the way science is done." What about President George W. Bush banning government funding of stem cell research? "He didn't stop stem cell research,"...

These People Took DDT Pills In the 1970s to Prove it Was Safe In 1971 two people in North Hollywood started eating DDT pills every day. That's right, they willingly swallowed 10mg of poison every single day for three months. In front of witnesses. From the Associated Press: - Robert Loibl and his wife, Louise, hold 10-milligram capsules of DDT which they took in front of witnesses for 93 days at lunch time, June 10, 1971. Loibl said their total dosage was more than the average person consumes in 83 years. He said his wife's dandruff disappeared, their appetites perked...

During the few minutes you spend reading this column, malaria will kill six Africans and sicken about 3,000 more, mostly children and pregnant women -- a rate of more than one million deaths and 500 million illnesses annually among the 2.2 billion people who live in malarial regions like Africa. There’s legislation moving through the Senate right now intended to reduce this tragic toll.U.S. taxpayers spend about $200 million annually on malaria control efforts. Ironically, almost none of this money is spent to kill or repel the mosquitoes that spread disease. The money is instead spent on anti-malarial drugs and...

Decades after industrial waste dumping turned part of Southern California's seafloor into a toxic hot spot, scientists have dredged up a mystery. Chemicals fouling the ocean off the Palos Verdes Peninsula seem to be going away without being cleaned up. Samples taken from the sediment suggest more than 100 metric tons of the banned pesticide DDT and industrial compounds known as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, have vanished from one of the country's most hazardous sites, almost a 90% drop in just five years.

Sleep tight. Don't let the bedbugs bite. Unfortunately for residents of many urban areas such as New York and Philadelphia, the bedbugs are not only biting but spreading at an alarming rate. Despite this outbreak, the mainstream media has until recently kept insisting that bedbugs developed a resistance to DDT so any emergency lifting of the EPA ban on that pesticide is unnecessary. However, your humble correspondent has speculated that the MSM would eventually have to change its position on the DDT ban due to the fact that so many of its members are being assaulted by bedbug attacks which...

Ironically, Charles Darwin set great store by his study of earthworms, which effectively mix and make most of the soil on Earth, but his successors in evolutionary science have tended to neglect the creatures that live beneath their feet. Instead, Professor Blaxter said, they regard the soil as a kind of test bed - or “black box” - that there is no need to understand. He added that this project would help to redress that issue. “Until the soil collapses, and the ecosystems dies completely, we don't know what's going on. We have to start to get inside the ‘black...

Rachel Carson honor at risk in Senate May 23, 2007 WASHINGTON – Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn has effectively blocked a resolution to honor environmental author Rachel Carson on the 100th anniversary of her birth, saying that her warnings about environmental damage have put a stigma on potentially lifesaving pesticides, congressional staffers said yesterday. Sen. Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., had intended to submit a resolution celebrating Carson, author of the 1962 book “Silent Spring,” for her “legacy of scientific rigor coupled with poetic sensibility.” Carson, who died in 1964, would have turned 100 this Sunday. Cardin has delayed the legislation, a spokeswoman...

Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring--the book that got mosquito-killer DDT banned and launched the modern environmental movement--while struggling with cancer. The disease killed Carson in 1964, two years after Silent Spring came out. Today's Washington Post has a story on Carson--whose 100th birth anniversary occurs later this month--and her noble fight against cancer. A touching piece. But maddening, too! Because in the story's 34 paragraphs, there are only a buried pair, the 26th and 27th, that note the ongoing controversy about DDT's ban. A Maryland Congressman (evil Republican, of course ... wink, wink) is quoted as saying that malaria deaths...

Who says there's never any good news? After more than 30 years and tens of millions dead -- mostly children -- the World Health Organization (WHO) has ended its ban on DDT. DDT is the most effective anti-mosquito, anti-malaria pesticide known. But thanks to the worldwide environmental movement and politically correct bureaucrats in the United States and at the United Nations, the use of this benign chemical has been discouraged in Africa and elsewhere, permitting killer mosquitoes to spread death.

An open-minded review of what extreme environmentalists have wrought on the USA and on the world inescapably leads to the conclusion that they have caused millions of deaths and trillions of dollars in damages and losses. If you think this is incorrect or an exaggeration, let us consider the record with respect to just three issues: the snail darter, nuclear power and DDT. The Snail Darter In 1976, with the Tellico Dam on the Tennessee River 99% complete, its construction was stopped and its destruction was ordered after a tiny fish called the snail darter was discovered in that river.

Sept. 27, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In his August 16, 2006 LifeSiteNews.com Special Report, Green Hands Dipped In Blood: The DDT Genocide, John Jalsevac exposed what may have been the worst crime of the 20th century, exceeding perhaps even the many millions of deaths caused by the Nazi’s or the horrific mass killings of Stalin or Mao Tse Tung. The current cause celebre of AIDS has caused nowhere near the perhaps 80 million deaths that have resulted so far in large part from the 30 year ban on the use of DDT to prevent malaria.Finally, recent news is that, despite...

Last week's announcement that the World Health Organization lifted its nearly 30-year ban on the insecticide DDT is perhaps the most promising development in global public health since well, 1943 when DDT was first used to combat insect-borne disease like typhus and malaria. Overlooked in all the hoopla over the announcement is the terrible toll in human lives (tens of millions dead, mostly pregnant women and children under age 5), illness (billions sickened) and poverty (more than $1 trillion in lost GDP in sub-Saharan Africa alone) caused by the tragic, decades-long ban.

See for example this thread first. I first saw this in Chemical & Engineering News, lo! these many years ago (maybe 1984 time frame?), and claim no credit except for remembering it. A mosquito was heard to complain, "I fear they have addled my brain!" "The cause of my sorrow is para-dicholoro- diphenyl-trichloroethane!"

Rachel Carson, a driving force behind the modern environmental movement, grew up in a modest homestead in Springdale Borough near the Allegheny River. For the budding marine biologist, the river's waters were an early inspiration. Now, more than four decades after Ms. Carson's death, her presence may return to those waters. Allegheny County Council tomorrow will consider renaming the Ninth Street Bridge in her honor. If the resolution is approved, Ms. Carson would join Roberto Clemente and Andy Warhol as namesakes for the three Downtown "Sister Bridges" that cross the Allegheny. "This is long overdue," said Esther L. Barazzone, president...

August 15, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Communism and fascism, as horrifically bloody as their legacy has been, have a lesser death count attributed to them than the misguided worldwide ban on DDT enforced by the World Health Organization, international aid organizations and others. So reports John Jalsevac in the LifeSiteNews.com Special Report, Green Hands Dipped In Blood: The DDT Genocide.Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, decrying the supposedly great harm caused by all pesticides to the natural environment and humans was released in 1962 and eventually led to the ban on DDT, still the most effective, cheapest, and arguably the cleanest way...

Stopping Malaria In the wake of the tsunami, malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases may be the next tragedy to hit Southeast Asia. DDT can prevent this tragedy. The massive magnitude 9.0 earthquake in Southeast Asia unleashed a terrifying tsunami that has already claimed more than 200,000 lives. But as the rainy season approaches, a new disaster may be in the offing. Standing water left by the tsunami and turned brackish with the onset of monsoon rains may attract swarms of disease-bearing mosquitoes. These mosquitoes may infect thousands upon thousands, maybe even millions, of tsunami survivors with malaria. According to the Associated...