DDT is no panacea
and is not always appropriate for every exotic disease, but neither does it kill millions of people every year the way the environmentalists do. Yes, people die when politics gets in the way of saving lives. I urge you to read the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research,
Health Policy Outlook No. 14, November 2007 "The rise, fall, rise, and imminent fall of DDT."
The modern environmental movement began with concerns about DDT. Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring questioned the effect that synthetic chemicals were having on the environment. Her argument was that DDT and its metabolites make bird eggshells thinner, leading to egg breakage and embryo death. Carson postulated that DDT would therefore severely harm bird reproduction, leading to her theoretical "silent spring." She also implied that DDT was a human carcinogen by telling anecdotal stories of individuals dying of cancer after using DDT.[19] . . .p.3
The delisting of DDT as the method of choice in many countries was a direct result of Ms. Carson's book and resulted in years of death and injury of millions, mostly in Africa. DDT was reintroduced in South Africa in 2000, and in just one year malaria cases fell nearly 80% in one of the hardest hit provinces. In 2006, malaria cases in that province were approximately 97% befow the high of 41,786 in 2000. Zambia too had great success when a private mining company restarted a malaria program reducing malaria incidence by 50%. But that's all about to change. Environmentalists are again raising their voices exaggeratimg the dangers.
Bias in the academic literature is accelerating. A recent article in The Lancet Infectious Diseases alleges that superior methods for malaria control exist--without providing a single reference for this claim.[52] The authors claim that DDT represents a public health hazard by citing two studies that, according to a 1995 WHO technical report, do not provide "convincing evidence of adverse effects of DDT exposure as a result of indoor residual spraying."[53] Furthermore, the authors misrepresent those defending the use of DDT. They claim that supporters view DDT as a "panacea"--dogmatically promoting it at every opportunity--yet they do not provide any evidence to back up their opinion. . . p.7
DDT has a better record than any other intervention. Every day people die. Someday another method might be developed. But meanwhile, environmentalists might be killing the very people who could do the research.
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6 comments:
That document uses bogus footnotes.
I suppose that, if one refuses to be swayed by the facts of the matter, one cannot be swayed away from a view that DDT should be used in great abundance and can be without killing lots of stuff, nor can one be swayed away from the view that DDT saves millions, though there's not much evidence to support such a claim.
It's not environmentalists killing those kids in Africa. It's people who argue we don't need to spend the money to get them good housing, good food, and good medical care, because we can just poison their troubles away. That's never been true, and arguing that it might be true has only delayed getting them treatments to stop malaria.
OK. Come up with your own footnotes. I dare you. You know there is no evidence that DDT has killed anyone; you know there is abundant evidence that malaria was stopped dead in its tracks. But you can't face the truth that you are killing people. WHO recognized it, so who are you?
Good housing and good food for dead children?
By the way, Norma, one of the key hoaxes involved in the anti-Rachel Carson, anti-environmental care campaign is the claim that William Ruckelshaus did something sneaky and wrong when he signed the order suspending the registration for DDT as a pesticide for use on cotton (that's the "ban" that they talk about).
There are wild claims made, that Ruckelshaus ignored the findings -- we know that's false because the federal courts reviewed the case, and they agreed -- or that Ruckelshaus made up the evidence, or lacked legal authority -- also wrong, for the same reasons.
Look at the AEI document. It offers a citation to something called "C.F.R." That's the code of federal regulations.
CFR is available on-line. I challenge you to find the hearings from Judge Sweeney that they claim to refer to with the citation offered.
It's a hoax citation, a fraud. It's been used by AEI and CEI and the tobacco lobby for about a decade. They know it's bogus. They know that scientists and a few others of us know it's bogus. They know Sweeney's ruling is not what they claimed.
But they count on your being unfamiliar with the federal regulations, unfamiliar with the history, and not likely to check their footnotes, in order to feed you a falsehood.
If your child did that to you, there would be consequences. Don't take it from someone just because they have AEI paying their rent.
Why would the JAMA comment on Mexico's mosquito eradication program in this article? Neither does the article mention DDT -- there is no call for DDT to fight the disease.
So where do you get the idea that DDT will work? Is it even the right pesticide for these species in this genus? We're only six weeks from the call for DDT from the great public health poobah now at the Hoover Institution, to fight West Nile virus. Only problem: DDT doesn't work well against those species, those species are best controlled by larvacides, and DDT is particularly poisonous, deadly and destructive in water.
Maslow might have said, when the only chemical you know is DDT, every problem tends to look like Rachel Carson's your enemy who will keep you from solving it.
But Rachel Carson is dead, Rachel Carson was right about DDT (it's deadly and not the most effective thing we have, nor even appropriate in many cases), and dengue fever's spread is as much about a warming climate (if it's not man caused, it will abate in time, right?) as it is about failure of mosquito eradication. That is to say, fighting dengue fever in the U.S. probably will work better if we don't kill off all the predators of mosquitoes.
In that area of Mexico and Texas shown in your map, there are three or four colonies of a total of a couple million Mexican free-tail bats (or Brazilian free-tails, depending on your chart). Each of those bats eats up to 20 times its body weight of disease-carrying mosquitoes each night.
Bats are particularly susceptible to DDT. (See my blog with the Dallas Morning News article on them.) They are just now recovering from the decimation of DDT spraying in the early 1960s. This species was down to a few thousand by 1970.
Today those bats are major allies in the fight against dengue fever.
And you ask to kill them? Why? Did you even know that the bats existed?
Now, can we talk about the insect-eating birds that DDT kills? How about the dragon flies and fireflies, whose adults eat mosquitoes, and whose larva eat mosquito larva, and both of which are particularly susceptible to DDT?
If DDT weren't so dangerous, we'd probably use it. But often, DDT is terribly counterproductive. In fighting disease carrying mosquitoes, it's a good idea not to kill off the natural predators of the mosquitoes.
By the way, I posted at least one other post earlier today that went into moderation. I don't recall links in it, but would you check to see if you can spring it from comment jail? Thanks.
I don't know what a "comment jail" is, but I haven't deleted anything you've written. Perhaps you viewed it in draft, then didn't post? That happens to me some times.
Although I don't have a degree in agriculture or veterinary medicine, that is my professional background (20 years, the rest in Slavic and Latin American studies), and yes, I know the value of birds and bats. I find it distressing that environmentalists and big agriculture are destroying their habitats with hair-brained energy schemes, and valuing their lives more than ours.
Mr. Darrell, you are a liberal and I am a conservative. Our views on this are conditioned by our world views. I don't expect you to share my concerns about creation, life and its sanctity; and I don't share yours about humans as the be-all, end-all decision makers in the course of history. I've spent my entire adult life in the university arena of ideas, and I can assure you, this is going nowhere. I've been a secular humanist, but I suspect you haven't been on my side of the fence row.
Now, have a nice holiday with your family and thanks for stopping by.
By "comment jail" I mean that my post is probably in your spam filter holding file. The message I got was that it was going to "moderation." You should have the message either awaiting your approval, or in your spam file.
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