Look them up yourself -- if you did you would find that this topic's theme (like that of most right wing myths) has been incorrect all along.
Rachel Carson ; mass murderer
- Thread starter Walter
- Start date
Look them up yourself -- if you did you would find that this topic's theme (like that of most right wing myths) has been incorrect all along.
Uganda Will Use DDT to Fight Malaria
Bonner R. Cohen | 01 Apr 2007
Heartland Institute
Concerned about the rising number of deaths mosquito-borne malaria is inflicting on its citizens, the government of Uganda has approved the use of the pesticide DDT to combat the deadly disease.
Activists Rebuffed
The decision, handed down in January, marks the end of a protracted conflict that pitted public health officials, who overwhelmingly favor the use of DDT, against environmental activists and corporate agricultural exporters, who oppose it.
Frustrated by the inability of other measures to stem the dreaded disease, which kills an estimated 100,000 Ugandans each year, officials at the country's National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA) will permit DDT to be sprayed in residences, where the chemical's unique properties irritate, repel, and poison mosquitoes while doing no harm to humans or animals.
Uganda's decision is contingent on approval from international authorities such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the secretariat of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), and the Rotterdam Convention.
DDT Historically Successful
DDT was last used in Uganda 46 years ago by WHO. It successfully controlled the spread of malaria in Kamungu province in the western region of the country. Uganda was one of many malaria-prone countries where the use of DDT brought the killer disease to the brink of eradication.
With the help of DDT, the global malaria death rate--which had been 1,740 deaths per million in 1930--dropped more than 70 percent, to 480 per million in 1950.
Since Uganda stopped using DDT, however, malaria has ravaged the country. Government officials have decided to rebuff environmental activists and once again use it to combat malaria.
False Concerns Doom Africans
Niger Innis, spokesman for the U.S. branch of the Congress of Racial Equality, said, "Environmentalists always claim to be stakeholders. But every day that they succeed in delaying the use of DDT and other insecticides, another 3,000 to 5,000 people die from malaria. Those victims and the half billion who get this disease every year, who lie in bed shaking with convulsions, who can't work or go to school, who end up with permanent brain damage from malaria--they are the real stakeholders. It's their views that count."
"The World Health Organization reviewed decades of scientific studies and concluded that spraying DDT on the inside walls of houses is perfectly safe for people and the environment," added Paul Driessen, senior policy advisor of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.
"More importantly," Driessen continued, "there is simply no substitute for it, at any price. Sprayed just once or twice a year, it keeps 90 percent of mosquitoes from even entering homes, irritates the ones that do enter, so they don't bite, kills those that land, and reduces malaria rates by 75 percent or more."
Political Wrangling Continues
Despite the hurdles posed by the need for approval by international organizations, the rehabilitation of DDT as an effective weapon against malaria continues apace. In May 2006, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) reversed more than 30 years of policy and announced it had authorized the use of DDT to help combat malaria in Africa. By late 2006, the agency was using the substance as part of its malaria-control efforts in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Zambia, with more African countries expected to join the indoor-spraying program in the coming years.
DDT received a further vote of confidence when, a few months after the USAID announcement, President George W. Bush included use of DDT as part of his international anti-malaria campaign.
Fiona Kobusingye-Boynes, coordinator for the Uganda division of the Congress of Racial Equality, said, "Spraying DDT is like putting a bed net over the entire house, to protect the whole family. Opponents talk constantly about minor, speculative, or imaginary dangers of using DDT. But they never say a word about the horrible risks of not using it--the very real risks that DDT would prevent.
"Ugandans are delighted that DDT is about to return, because they know it will save lives," Kobusingye-Boynes continued.
Bonner R. Cohen (brcohen1@ix.netcom.com) is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research in Washington, DC and author of The Green Wave; Environmentalism and Its Consequences, published by the Capital Research Center.
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=20807
This article is from the Africa Fighting Malaria website. DDT is our best defense against malaria.
Bonner R. Cohen | 01 Apr 2007
Heartland Institute
Concerned about the rising number of deaths mosquito-borne malaria is inflicting on its citizens, the government of Uganda has approved the use of the pesticide DDT to combat the deadly disease.
Activists Rebuffed
The decision, handed down in January, marks the end of a protracted conflict that pitted public health officials, who overwhelmingly favor the use of DDT, against environmental activists and corporate agricultural exporters, who oppose it.
Frustrated by the inability of other measures to stem the dreaded disease, which kills an estimated 100,000 Ugandans each year, officials at the country's National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA) will permit DDT to be sprayed in residences, where the chemical's unique properties irritate, repel, and poison mosquitoes while doing no harm to humans or animals.
Uganda's decision is contingent on approval from international authorities such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the secretariat of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), and the Rotterdam Convention.
DDT Historically Successful
DDT was last used in Uganda 46 years ago by WHO. It successfully controlled the spread of malaria in Kamungu province in the western region of the country. Uganda was one of many malaria-prone countries where the use of DDT brought the killer disease to the brink of eradication.
With the help of DDT, the global malaria death rate--which had been 1,740 deaths per million in 1930--dropped more than 70 percent, to 480 per million in 1950.
Since Uganda stopped using DDT, however, malaria has ravaged the country. Government officials have decided to rebuff environmental activists and once again use it to combat malaria.
False Concerns Doom Africans
Niger Innis, spokesman for the U.S. branch of the Congress of Racial Equality, said, "Environmentalists always claim to be stakeholders. But every day that they succeed in delaying the use of DDT and other insecticides, another 3,000 to 5,000 people die from malaria. Those victims and the half billion who get this disease every year, who lie in bed shaking with convulsions, who can't work or go to school, who end up with permanent brain damage from malaria--they are the real stakeholders. It's their views that count."
"The World Health Organization reviewed decades of scientific studies and concluded that spraying DDT on the inside walls of houses is perfectly safe for people and the environment," added Paul Driessen, senior policy advisor of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.
"More importantly," Driessen continued, "there is simply no substitute for it, at any price. Sprayed just once or twice a year, it keeps 90 percent of mosquitoes from even entering homes, irritates the ones that do enter, so they don't bite, kills those that land, and reduces malaria rates by 75 percent or more."
Political Wrangling Continues
Despite the hurdles posed by the need for approval by international organizations, the rehabilitation of DDT as an effective weapon against malaria continues apace. In May 2006, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) reversed more than 30 years of policy and announced it had authorized the use of DDT to help combat malaria in Africa. By late 2006, the agency was using the substance as part of its malaria-control efforts in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Zambia, with more African countries expected to join the indoor-spraying program in the coming years.
DDT received a further vote of confidence when, a few months after the USAID announcement, President George W. Bush included use of DDT as part of his international anti-malaria campaign.
Fiona Kobusingye-Boynes, coordinator for the Uganda division of the Congress of Racial Equality, said, "Spraying DDT is like putting a bed net over the entire house, to protect the whole family. Opponents talk constantly about minor, speculative, or imaginary dangers of using DDT. But they never say a word about the horrible risks of not using it--the very real risks that DDT would prevent.
"Ugandans are delighted that DDT is about to return, because they know it will save lives," Kobusingye-Boynes continued.
Bonner R. Cohen (brcohen1@ix.netcom.com) is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research in Washington, DC and author of The Green Wave; Environmentalism and Its Consequences, published by the Capital Research Center.
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=20807
This article is from the Africa Fighting Malaria website. DDT is our best defense against malaria.
How incredibly short sighted this is. Lets fix the problem now, and not worry about the ramifications down the road. DDT does have known properties which impair and can cause abnormalities. To be terribly specific, one of the better known mechanisms is the interaction with prostraglandin, specifically a metabolite of DDT, called DDE. Prostaglandins are derived from fatty acids, and technically are more of a hormone than a lipid. Important prostaglandin functions: regulate inflammation, hormones and calcium, constrict and dilate smooth muscles( like the walls in organs exposed to free space), and are involved with the accumulation and dispersion of platelets. They are also used to treat a variety of medical conditions ranging from platelet disorders to ulcers to erectile dysfunction to heart conditions. The list is long.
Where does DDT and it's metabolite DDE come in? Well DDE inhibits the interaction between one of the essential fatty acids (arachadonic sp?) which in turn disrupts platelet aggregation. Basically DDE generally screws up the prostaglandin formation from the fatty acids which affects all those other maladies above. It also interferes with cyclic AMP which is synthesized from the cellular energy ATP. All of the cells in your body require this ATP for an energy source, and part of that ATP is converted to AMP which in turn controls many more biological processes.
Research is progressing in microbiology and genetics. The more DDT we use, the more it will accumulate in the fatty tissues in our bodies, and cause these metabolic problems. I say more genetic research.
Where does DDT and it's metabolite DDE come in? Well DDE inhibits the interaction between one of the essential fatty acids (arachadonic sp?) which in turn disrupts platelet aggregation. Basically DDE generally screws up the prostaglandin formation from the fatty acids which affects all those other maladies above. It also interferes with cyclic AMP which is synthesized from the cellular energy ATP. All of the cells in your body require this ATP for an energy source, and part of that ATP is converted to AMP which in turn controls many more biological processes.
Research is progressing in microbiology and genetics. The more DDT we use, the more it will accumulate in the fatty tissues in our bodies, and cause these metabolic problems. I say more genetic research.
"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean," said Humpty Dumpty -- "neither more nor less."
Lewis Carroll's "Looking Glass" logic often seems to be a guiding principle for environmental and corporate social responsibility (CSR) activists. They claim to be committed to people and planet, not just profits -- and to honesty, transparency, accountability and human health. One would expect that such basic ethical standards would apply equally to for-profit companies and nonprofit advocacy corporations.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore testifies before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on global warming, on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 21, 2007. REUTERS/Jim Young (UNITED STATES)
However, the activists who defined them routinely exempt themselves. For them, CSR standards are primarily another weapon for bludgeoning opponents, raising money and advancing political agendas. Their DDT and global warming campaigns are illustrative.
Forty years ago, Environmental Defense (ED) was launched to secure a ban on DDT and, in the words of co-founder Charles Wurster, "achieve a level of authority" that environmentalists never had before. Its high-pressure campaign persuaded EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus to ignore the findings of his own scientific panel and ban DDT in the US in 1972.
Those findings and research by other scientists showed that DDT is not harmful to people, birds or the environment, especially when small quantities are sprayed on walls to repel mosquitoes and prevent malaria. But ED and allied groups continued their misinformation campaign, until the chemical (and other insecticides) were banished even from global healthcare programs.
Thankfully, DDT had already helped eradicate malaria in the United States and Europe. But the disease still sickens 500 million people a year and kills 2 million, mostly African women and children. Since 1972, tens of millions have died who would likely have lived if their countries had been able to keep DDT in their disease control arsenals.
A year ago, the USAID and World Health Organization finally began supporting DDT use once again. But ED, Pesticide Action Network and other agitators still promote ridiculous anti-DDT themes on their websites, claiming for instance that it is "associated with" low birth weights in babies and shortened lactation in nursing mothers.
Even if true, notes Uganda's Fiona Kobusingye, these risks "are nothing compared to the constant danger of losing more babies and mothers to malaria." She speaks from bitter experience. She's had malaria at least 20 times and lost her son and two sisters to the disease, which also claimed a fifth nephew just last week.
"How can US environmentalists tell us we should be more worried about insecticides than about malaria?" she asks. "Their attitudes are immoral eco-imperialism -- a crime against humanity." None of these pressure groups has ever apologized for their disingenuous campaigns or atoned in any way for the misery and death they helped perpetuate --much less been held accountable. They won't even promise to be more honest in future campaigns and fund-raising appeals.
Instead, they blame today's still horrendous malaria rates on global warming. Malaria was once prevalent over much of Europe and the United States, even in Siberia -- and they want people to think the disease is spreading because global temperatures have risen a few tenths of a degree. Even worse, they are using fears of climate chaos to justify their long antipathy to energy and economic development.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/driessen032607.htm
Environmentalism run amok.
Lewis Carroll's "Looking Glass" logic often seems to be a guiding principle for environmental and corporate social responsibility (CSR) activists. They claim to be committed to people and planet, not just profits -- and to honesty, transparency, accountability and human health. One would expect that such basic ethical standards would apply equally to for-profit companies and nonprofit advocacy corporations.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore testifies before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on global warming, on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 21, 2007. REUTERS/Jim Young (UNITED STATES)
However, the activists who defined them routinely exempt themselves. For them, CSR standards are primarily another weapon for bludgeoning opponents, raising money and advancing political agendas. Their DDT and global warming campaigns are illustrative.
Forty years ago, Environmental Defense (ED) was launched to secure a ban on DDT and, in the words of co-founder Charles Wurster, "achieve a level of authority" that environmentalists never had before. Its high-pressure campaign persuaded EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus to ignore the findings of his own scientific panel and ban DDT in the US in 1972.
Those findings and research by other scientists showed that DDT is not harmful to people, birds or the environment, especially when small quantities are sprayed on walls to repel mosquitoes and prevent malaria. But ED and allied groups continued their misinformation campaign, until the chemical (and other insecticides) were banished even from global healthcare programs.
Thankfully, DDT had already helped eradicate malaria in the United States and Europe. But the disease still sickens 500 million people a year and kills 2 million, mostly African women and children. Since 1972, tens of millions have died who would likely have lived if their countries had been able to keep DDT in their disease control arsenals.
A year ago, the USAID and World Health Organization finally began supporting DDT use once again. But ED, Pesticide Action Network and other agitators still promote ridiculous anti-DDT themes on their websites, claiming for instance that it is "associated with" low birth weights in babies and shortened lactation in nursing mothers.
Even if true, notes Uganda's Fiona Kobusingye, these risks "are nothing compared to the constant danger of losing more babies and mothers to malaria." She speaks from bitter experience. She's had malaria at least 20 times and lost her son and two sisters to the disease, which also claimed a fifth nephew just last week.
"How can US environmentalists tell us we should be more worried about insecticides than about malaria?" she asks. "Their attitudes are immoral eco-imperialism -- a crime against humanity." None of these pressure groups has ever apologized for their disingenuous campaigns or atoned in any way for the misery and death they helped perpetuate --much less been held accountable. They won't even promise to be more honest in future campaigns and fund-raising appeals.
Instead, they blame today's still horrendous malaria rates on global warming. Malaria was once prevalent over much of Europe and the United States, even in Siberia -- and they want people to think the disease is spreading because global temperatures have risen a few tenths of a degree. Even worse, they are using fears of climate chaos to justify their long antipathy to energy and economic development.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/driessen032607.htm
Environmentalism run amok.
"Gopher, Wikipedia was never meant to supplant the tried and true. Enough scandals have happened at the online plug-hub already. It's more like an erudite comic book."
... and their sources???
... and their sources???
Suffering in Silence
The real legacy of Rachel Carson
Katherine Mangu-Ward | April 21, 2007
When the Christian Science Monitor recently declared Al Gore "the Rachel Carson of global warming," the former vice president must have bubbled over with pride. There is, it seems, no higher compliment one can bestow on an environmentalist.
Next month marks what would have been Carson's 100th birthday, and festivities abound. The author of "Silent Spring" -- the 1962 book that birthed modern environmentalism and made "DDT" a dirty word -- Carson is the subject of an exhibit at the National Archives and the star of its Environmental Film Festival this year.
Considered a secular saint by some, she was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the Century and is the posthumous recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. A book due out on Earth Day (when else?), called "Courage for the Earth," is composed entirely of glowing tributes. Front and center is an essay by Mr. Gore, actually a reprint of the introduction he wrote to the 30th-anniversary edition of "Silent Spring." In it he admits that he is a Carson fanboy -- he says that he has a portrait of her hanging in his office and that, "in spirit, Rachel Carson sits in on all the important environmental meetings of [the Clinton] administration."
With all the birthday hullabaloo, now seems as good a time as any for a re-examination of Carson's legacy.
The display at the National Archives focuses on Carson's time as a civil servant at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries -- a sort of archival "Before They Were Stars" for green groupies. It presents early evidence, as the exhibit has it, of her "gift for turning dry scientific writing into prose easily understood by lay readers." Carson, a marine biologist by training, retired from government service after a trio of books on the sea brought her a decent income and modest literary stardom.
Her next project, "Silent Spring," did rather more -- it changed the world. In it, she wrote: "As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life," causing, among other horrors, "spring...unheralded by the return of birds." The book decried insecticides like DDT as destroyers of ecosystems and threats to human health.
The following year, CBS aired the hour-long special that brought her anti-pesticide manifesto to a wider audience, "The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson." CBS received more than 1,000 letters of protest and lost at least two major sponsors -- chemical companies feared the public's panicked response to Carson's claims. Until last month, the television program was moldering in the National Archives' vaults.
At the time of the controversy, DDT was used widely as an insecticide on U.S. farms. Since World War II, it had also proved remarkably effective at controlling insect-borne diseases, but Carson essentially ignored that fact; so have her successors.
Some of Carson's star anecdotes about DDT's carcinogenic qualities turned out to be flawed: Her tale of "a housewife who abhorred spiders" spraying her basement in August and winding up dead of "acute leukemia" by October seems absurd to the modern reader, as does the man who winds up hemorrhaging in the hospital due to a "severe depression of the bone marrow" just "a short time" after spraying for roaches. Neither cancer could have been caused by DDT in so short a time.
Partly as a result of Carson's work, the U.S. banned DDT in 1972, around the same time as most of the developed world. In 2001, the Stockholm Convention, a global treaty, banned DDT as part of a "dirty dozen" of agricultural chemicals.
The convention contains a tightly circumscribed exception for continued public health use, but even that exception almost didn't make it into the final document. Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and more than 300 other environmental groups fought tooth and nail against it. In recent years, many such groups tried to get a complete ban on all DDT uses by 2007 -- in time for Carson's birthday.
To what effect? The World Health Organization now estimates that there are between 300 and 500 million cases of malaria annually, causing approximately one million deaths. About 80% of those are young children, millions of whom could have been saved over the years with the regular application of DDT to their environments.
Carson cannot be blamed directly for these deaths. She didn't urge total bans in "Silent Spring." Instead, on the single page obliquely acknowledging DDT as an anti-malarial agent, she writes, "Practical advice should be 'Spray as little as you possibly can' rather than 'Spray to the limit of your capacity.'"
In the National Archives exhibit, Carson is described as "a passionate voice for protecting the environment and human health." Her concerns about the effects of insect death on bird populations were well-founded. But threats to human health were central to her argument, and Carson was wrong about those. Despite massive exposure in many populations over several decades, there is no decisive evidence that DDT causes cancer in people, and it is unforgivable that she overlooked the enormous boon of DDT for malaria control in her own time.
In the years before it lost the public's support in the mid-1960s, the Global Malaria Eradication Programme wiped out malaria in the American South, several Latin American countries, Taiwan, the Balkans, much of the Caribbean, sections of northern Africa and much of Australia and the South Pacific. Exposés like Carson's made the global campaign's methods increasingly unpopular and eventually brought to a halt the effort to end malaria on a global scale. The disease has since bounced back in many developing countries. In the mid-'90s, the only South American country that continued to use DDT, Ecuador, was also the only country to experience a significant decline in malaria. Many countries, like Uganda, remain hesitant to use DDT because European nations have threatened to refuse their agricultural exports if they do.
"It's a paradox that right now we are using pesticides at a greater rate than when 'Silent Spring' was published," Diana Post, executive director of an environmental nonprofit called the Rachel Carson Council, told the Washington Post. Paradoxically, widespread use of DDT for malaria control would likely result in fewer pounds of insecticide being released, not more, since countries struggling with malaria are now using much larger quantities of less potent alternatives. Spraying houses in the whole country of Guyana required the same amount of DDT once used on a single cotton field in a single growing season.
Carson didn't have the benefit of more than 40 years of additional data, but her successors do. DDT remains the cheapest and most powerful tool for stopping malaria. When sprayed on interior walls, it has virtually zero interaction with wild ecosystems. Yet when the topic of relaxing restrictions in order to save millions of lives comes up, someone inevitably brandishes a copy of "Silent Spring" and opposition is silenced so completely that you could hear a mosquito buzzing in the next room.
Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor for reason. This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal.
The real legacy of Rachel Carson
Katherine Mangu-Ward | April 21, 2007
When the Christian Science Monitor recently declared Al Gore "the Rachel Carson of global warming," the former vice president must have bubbled over with pride. There is, it seems, no higher compliment one can bestow on an environmentalist.
Next month marks what would have been Carson's 100th birthday, and festivities abound. The author of "Silent Spring" -- the 1962 book that birthed modern environmentalism and made "DDT" a dirty word -- Carson is the subject of an exhibit at the National Archives and the star of its Environmental Film Festival this year.
Considered a secular saint by some, she was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the Century and is the posthumous recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. A book due out on Earth Day (when else?), called "Courage for the Earth," is composed entirely of glowing tributes. Front and center is an essay by Mr. Gore, actually a reprint of the introduction he wrote to the 30th-anniversary edition of "Silent Spring." In it he admits that he is a Carson fanboy -- he says that he has a portrait of her hanging in his office and that, "in spirit, Rachel Carson sits in on all the important environmental meetings of [the Clinton] administration."
With all the birthday hullabaloo, now seems as good a time as any for a re-examination of Carson's legacy.
The display at the National Archives focuses on Carson's time as a civil servant at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries -- a sort of archival "Before They Were Stars" for green groupies. It presents early evidence, as the exhibit has it, of her "gift for turning dry scientific writing into prose easily understood by lay readers." Carson, a marine biologist by training, retired from government service after a trio of books on the sea brought her a decent income and modest literary stardom.
Her next project, "Silent Spring," did rather more -- it changed the world. In it, she wrote: "As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life," causing, among other horrors, "spring...unheralded by the return of birds." The book decried insecticides like DDT as destroyers of ecosystems and threats to human health.
The following year, CBS aired the hour-long special that brought her anti-pesticide manifesto to a wider audience, "The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson." CBS received more than 1,000 letters of protest and lost at least two major sponsors -- chemical companies feared the public's panicked response to Carson's claims. Until last month, the television program was moldering in the National Archives' vaults.
At the time of the controversy, DDT was used widely as an insecticide on U.S. farms. Since World War II, it had also proved remarkably effective at controlling insect-borne diseases, but Carson essentially ignored that fact; so have her successors.
Some of Carson's star anecdotes about DDT's carcinogenic qualities turned out to be flawed: Her tale of "a housewife who abhorred spiders" spraying her basement in August and winding up dead of "acute leukemia" by October seems absurd to the modern reader, as does the man who winds up hemorrhaging in the hospital due to a "severe depression of the bone marrow" just "a short time" after spraying for roaches. Neither cancer could have been caused by DDT in so short a time.
Partly as a result of Carson's work, the U.S. banned DDT in 1972, around the same time as most of the developed world. In 2001, the Stockholm Convention, a global treaty, banned DDT as part of a "dirty dozen" of agricultural chemicals.
The convention contains a tightly circumscribed exception for continued public health use, but even that exception almost didn't make it into the final document. Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and more than 300 other environmental groups fought tooth and nail against it. In recent years, many such groups tried to get a complete ban on all DDT uses by 2007 -- in time for Carson's birthday.
To what effect? The World Health Organization now estimates that there are between 300 and 500 million cases of malaria annually, causing approximately one million deaths. About 80% of those are young children, millions of whom could have been saved over the years with the regular application of DDT to their environments.
Carson cannot be blamed directly for these deaths. She didn't urge total bans in "Silent Spring." Instead, on the single page obliquely acknowledging DDT as an anti-malarial agent, she writes, "Practical advice should be 'Spray as little as you possibly can' rather than 'Spray to the limit of your capacity.'"
In the National Archives exhibit, Carson is described as "a passionate voice for protecting the environment and human health." Her concerns about the effects of insect death on bird populations were well-founded. But threats to human health were central to her argument, and Carson was wrong about those. Despite massive exposure in many populations over several decades, there is no decisive evidence that DDT causes cancer in people, and it is unforgivable that she overlooked the enormous boon of DDT for malaria control in her own time.
In the years before it lost the public's support in the mid-1960s, the Global Malaria Eradication Programme wiped out malaria in the American South, several Latin American countries, Taiwan, the Balkans, much of the Caribbean, sections of northern Africa and much of Australia and the South Pacific. Exposés like Carson's made the global campaign's methods increasingly unpopular and eventually brought to a halt the effort to end malaria on a global scale. The disease has since bounced back in many developing countries. In the mid-'90s, the only South American country that continued to use DDT, Ecuador, was also the only country to experience a significant decline in malaria. Many countries, like Uganda, remain hesitant to use DDT because European nations have threatened to refuse their agricultural exports if they do.
"It's a paradox that right now we are using pesticides at a greater rate than when 'Silent Spring' was published," Diana Post, executive director of an environmental nonprofit called the Rachel Carson Council, told the Washington Post. Paradoxically, widespread use of DDT for malaria control would likely result in fewer pounds of insecticide being released, not more, since countries struggling with malaria are now using much larger quantities of less potent alternatives. Spraying houses in the whole country of Guyana required the same amount of DDT once used on a single cotton field in a single growing season.
Carson didn't have the benefit of more than 40 years of additional data, but her successors do. DDT remains the cheapest and most powerful tool for stopping malaria. When sprayed on interior walls, it has virtually zero interaction with wild ecosystems. Yet when the topic of relaxing restrictions in order to save millions of lives comes up, someone inevitably brandishes a copy of "Silent Spring" and opposition is silenced so completely that you could hear a mosquito buzzing in the next room.
Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor for reason. This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal.
Canola oil ($8.80/kg), corn oil($4.25/l.), etc. are fairly cheap and are not that much of an impact on the environment. I put a couple liters in a sprayer every year and walk about spraying whatever stagnant water I can find. Last year I counted one mosquito flying around (and I have an idea that it was an illegal immigrant). And I have a creek flowing down my property.
Reason claims to be libertarian but all too often succumbs to right wing quackery. I know that as a former subscriber. And as usual it is wrong because it, like the thread's starter, still believes DDT was banned when it was not as previously documented above.
thomaska,
Birds provide critical goods and services to the environment in their habits, including seed dispersal, insect and rodent control, scavenging, and pollination. In short, plants couldn't survive without birds, worms and bugs, and the human species, in turn, cannot survive without plantlife. Nature is intricately related. To ensure the survival of one species we have to nurture all.
Many people here seem to think that man is somehow isolated from rather than part of natural world.
Consider the case of the disappearing bee:
No bees equals no pollination equal failed crops equals food shortages....
Once a species disappears, its gone forever. Longterm decisions which affect future generations should not be made casually or in ignorance. We really have no idea of the true value of diversity. To be on the safe side, we should make sacrifices to preserve biodiversity. Our longterm survival probably depends on it.
If the Lourve was cold, would it make sense to start burning priceless paintings in order to generate some heat temporarily?
In effect that is what we are doing.
http://www.well.com/user/davidu/extinction.html
Consider the case of the disappearing bee:
No bees equals no pollination equal failed crops equals food shortages....
Once a species disappears, its gone forever. Longterm decisions which affect future generations should not be made casually or in ignorance. We really have no idea of the true value of diversity. To be on the safe side, we should make sacrifices to preserve biodiversity. Our longterm survival probably depends on it.
If the Lourve was cold, would it make sense to start burning priceless paintings in order to generate some heat temporarily?
In effect that is what we are doing.
http://www.well.com/user/davidu/extinction.html
There is only one species on the planet whose extinction would have an immediate beneficial impact on the rest of the species.
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Every creature on this planet has a defined purpose and is part of the ecological chain of life,so if one part of the chain is gone..we're in deep doodoo.
B.S. The have a defined Niche not a defined purpose. If species were that interdependent the biosphere would have went extent long ago.
As we approach the 100th birthday of this mass murderer:
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=264807644698468
http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?J...b&page=NewsArticle&id=15009&news_iv_ctrl=1021
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2007/05/sen_coburn_foils_honor_for_rac.html
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=264807644698468
http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?J...b&page=NewsArticle&id=15009&news_iv_ctrl=1021
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2007/05/sen_coburn_foils_honor_for_rac.html