Showing posts with label malaria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label malaria. Show all posts

Friday, April 22, 2016

Why are you voting Democrat?

I checked a security firm website today specifically on public restrooms, and it recounted all the bad stuff that happens, from physical abuse (a girl was killed in a Delaware bathroom yesterday by other girls) to graffiti, to homeless people undressing and washing up, to sexual assaults, and mentally ill smearing feces. It reminded me that one of our nephews dropped out of high school when he was harassed in the school rest room by gay students years ago, and he knew the administration would never take his side. Those stories don't get in the news because men are afraid to report assaults by other men out of fear of being called gay. And yet taking into consideration the prison population, more rapes happen to men than to women. The military is another place men are assaulted. 
 
Then I remembered you do see bath room assaults on women reported from time to time, so why would any respectable business, a celebrity whose fortune has been made by adoring female fans, or a state responsible for the security of its citizens, even dream of such a ridiculous encouragement as what is happening today? Because it's being pushed by the Democrat party.
 
Just out of curiosity, how deep in the muck are you Democrats that read this blog going to let the party take you? For decades your party (which was mine until 2000) platform has promoted the destruction of the unborn for any reason—female, color, disability, college plans, or whim. You can say, "Well, I personally wouldn’t have an abortion, but I support the right yada, yada."  Really? 
 
Was it 2008 or 2012 “God bless America” was booed at your convention? Your political platform also promotes embryonic stem cell research (by government—it’s never been illegal for private research) even though not one single advancement in health has come from that. Democrats have pushed same sex marriage on a society and the historical record that doesn’t want it. It has destroyed small businesses and families that won’t comply. It routinely makes a mockery of our Constitution.  It promotes climate change wealth transfer which even if it were true might possibly make a difference of 1 degree in a century, while billions that could be spent through technology to improve lives is spent on a fantasy. 
 
 
 
Democrats love Earth Day, today, and President Nixon took advantage of that silliness and created the EPA which is implicated in a number of scandals this year. Earth Day (1970) is also the anniversary of taking DDT off the market, allowing many millions of brown and black children to die of malaria and the crippling of millions of adults. Mosquito borne viruses are creeping back, and just watch the Democrats switch plans when they or someone in their family get dengue or Zika. 
 
 I’ll probably be leaving the Republican party if Trump is the candidate—the battle between the creepy clown and the crook—but I don’t think I could look in the mirror and respect myself if I were a registered Democrat, even for a primary.
 
Why are you?
 
 

Happy Earth Day. . . Sucker

Earth Day is the highest holy day of the Climate Change/Global Warming religion. A modern day faith for pagans whose chant is, "I'm spiritual, but not religious." It was established in 1970, the same year that DDT was officially declared off limits, sacrificing to the new gods millions of brown and black children from malaria in developing countries. One of the saints of this new 20th c. religion is Rachel Carson; Al Gore used to be high priest, but not sure if his stock is still high. 46 years later and there still isn't a good replacement for DDT, but you keep buying and donating those bed nets to make yourself feel better. When Zika lands in DC, or the Attorney General gets dengue, someone may just have a change of heart about DDT. And that smartest politician of all times, Republican Richard Nixon, saw the response of the gullible to the first Earth Day, and used it to develop another huge bureaucracy from 15 other agencies, calling it the Environmental Protection Agency. Now only the government is allowed to pollute water.

 http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/07/climate_change_hysteria_and_the_madness_of_crowds.html

"The World Health Organization (WHO) credits DDT with saving anywhere from 50 million to a 100 million lives by preventing the spread of malaria. There were sharp drops in malaria cases reported in parts of Europe, India, and the U.S. following World War II according to WHO. In fact, malaria was virtually banished in the U.S. thanks to DDT, government studies show. Unfortunately, DDT was later banned as a result of unfounded hysteria allowing malaria to spread in developing parts of the world where about 50 million children succumbed to the disease."
 http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/kevin-mooney/2008/10/07/human-cost-global-warming-hysteria-subject-new-documentary
 http://reason.com/archives/2012/09/26/silent-spring-turns-50-this-week

Friday, February 27, 2015

The latest report on President’s Malaria Initiative

U.S. aid devoted to malaria increased from $149 million in 2000 to $1.2 billion in 2008.
In June 2005, President George W.Bush launched President’s Malaria Initiative PMI, “a major 5-year, $1.2 billion initiative to support a rapid scale-up of malaria prevention and treatment interventions in 15 high-burden countries in sub-Saharan Africa.The Initiative is led by the U.S.Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented together with the U.S.Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).When it was launched, the goal of PMI was to reduce malaria-related mortality by 50 percent across the 15 PMI-supported countries through a rapid scale-up of four proven and highly effective malaria prevention and treatment measures: ITNs; IRS; accurate diagnosis and prompt treatment with ACTs; and IPTp. [insect treated nets; indoor residual spraying; artemisinin-based combination therapies;  intermittent preventive treatment of pregnant women . ] http://www.pmi.gov/docs/default-source/default-document-library/pmi-reports/president's-malaria-initiative-strategy-2015-2020.pdf

image
But as you can see from this graph in 2012, the rates and deaths from malaria are still much higher than when DDT was allowed.  This chart starts with 1983, and DDT ended in the 1970s after Silent Sprint written by Rachel Carson, a non-scientist, became popular.     She may have killed more people than WWII.

image

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/feb/03/malaria-deaths-research

 http://journalistsresource.org/studies/international/development/global-malaria-mortality-1980-2010-systematic-analysis#sthash.pTcujSy1.dpuf

  • Global malaria deaths increased from 995,000 in 1980 to a peak of 1,817,000 in 2004, and then decreased to 1,238,000 in 2010.
  • In Africa, malaria deaths increased from 493,000 in 1980 to 1,613,000 in 2004, and then decreased by about 30% in 2010 to 1,133,000. Outside of Africa, malaria deaths have steadily decreased, from 502,000 in 1980 to 104,000 in 2010.
  • The majority (65%) of all malaria deaths occur in children under age 15. Individuals ages 15-49 years, 50-69 years, and 70 years or older accounted for 20%, 9% and 6%, respectively, of malaria deaths in 2010.
  • Overall, 433,000 more deaths occurred worldwide in individuals aged 5 years or older in 2010 than was suggested by official WHO estimates In 2012 an important research report on malaria was published pointing out serious errors in the tracking of malaria deaths. (The Lancet, “Global Malaria Mortality Between 1980 and 2010: A Systematic Analysis,”) Their figure of 1.2 million deaths for 2010 is nearly double the 655,000 estimated in last year's World Malaria Report.

"You learn in medical school that people exposed to malaria as children develop immunity and rarely die from malaria as adults," said [Christopher] Murray, IHME director and the study's lead author. "What we have found in hospital records, death records, surveys and other sources shows that just is not the case."

Most deaths are still in children, but a fifth are among those aged 15 to 49, 9% are among 50- to 69-year-olds and 6% are in people over 70, so a third of all deaths are in adults. In countries outside sub-Saharan Africa, more than 40% of deaths were in adults.

In Africa, though, the contribution of malaria to children's deaths is higher than had been thought, causing 24% of their deaths in 2008 and not 16% as found by a report by Black and colleagues, whose methodology was used in the World Malaria Report.

The current PMI funding and goals ended with 2014.  The only budget information I found for post 2015 is a draft.  Don’t know if it was approved, but it does report a funding gap.  Since 2009 the funding definitely has not kept up with the initial push.

http://www.pmi.gov/docs/default-source/default-document-library/tools-curricula/pmi-strategy-2015-2020-draft-for-external-review.pdf?sfvrsn=6

http://reliefweb.int/report/world/president-s-malaria-initiative-strategy-2015-2020

http://www.fightingmalaria.org/

Monday, October 13, 2014

Ebola vs. Malaria, which kills more?

While you're thinking about Ebola, "Over one million people die from malaria each year, mostly children under five years of age, with 90 per cent of malaria cases occurring in Sub-Saharan Africa. An estimated 300-600 million people suffer from malaria each year."

Malaria has been pretty much wiped out in North America, but each year about 2,000 come here with it--didn't take the right precautions. DDT was discovered to be effective in 1939; the U.S. virtually eliminated the disease (about 15,000 a year) by 1951.

Ask the progressives and environmentalists why DDT isn't used today in Africa. Is it any wonder they are suspicious of western values and motives?

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1259

http://www.smh.com.au/world/malaria-death-rate-slashed-with-use-of-controversial-ddt-20131010-2vb7c.html

Thursday, October 02, 2014

The residue of Silent Spring is still killing

Worried about Ebola?  Malaria will probably kill more while you’re reading this than the current Ebola epidemic.

“Published in 1962, Silent Spring used manipulated data and wildly exaggerated claims (sound familiar?) to push for a worldwide ban on the pesticide known as DDT – which is, to this day, the most effective weapon against malarial mosquitoes. The Environmental Protection Agency held extensive hearings after the uproar produced by this book… and these hearings concluded that DDT should not be banned. A few months after the hearings ended, EPA administrator William Ruckleshaus over-ruled his own agency and banned DDT anyway, in what he later admitted was a “political” decision. Threats to withhold American foreign aid swiftly spread the ban across the world.”  http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2010/02/16/the-green-death/

All methods of disease control eventually lose their effectiveness, so don’t send me progressive, liberal and greenie links,  but this was ripped out of the tool box of things that worked 50 years ago freeing Africans from a terrible scourge.  Millions have died or been crippled, and the victims are left with bed nets and local spraying of ponds and homes (and who knows what is in that brew). What works, really works quickly, is building hysteria over diseases that may not ever harm us, or not looking at all for the causes of the current illness sending children to the hospital coinciding with an unprecedented number of illegal immigrant children being spread around the country.

http://www.nature.com/news/ebola-outbreak-shuts-down-malaria-control-efforts-1.16029

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/26/malaria-deaths-ebola-diarrhea-pneumonia_n_5886652.html

Wednesday, June 04, 2014

Rachel Carson’s legacy for the poor and dark skinned

The legacy of Rachel Carson [her book Silent Spring launched the modern environmentalist movement 51years ago] is that tens of millions of human lives – mostly children in poor, tropical countries – have been traded for the possibility of slightly improved fertility in raptors. This remains one of the monumental human tragedies of the last century." What are the trade offs for American's poor and low income with Obama's new oppressive EPA regulations?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/henrymiller/2012/09/05/rachel-carsons-deadly-fantasies/

Douglas's review contributed to the success of...

 

http://cei.org/news-releases/new-study-rachel-carson-was-wrong?

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Global warming measures and malaria

We've killed a lot of Africans and Asians with our messing around with malaria and other mosquito borne diseases--more than all the wars of the 20th century; more than all the lives lost in the transatlantic slave trade. But we could possibly do something with the money we're planning to throw at an unsuccessful warming trick. Like try to undo the damage.
    "Take malaria. Most estimates suggest that if nothing is done, 3% more of the Earth's population will be at risk of infection by 2100. The most efficient global carbon cuts designed to keep average global temperatures from rising any higher than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (a plan proposed by the industrialized G-8 nations) would cost the world $40 trillion a year in lost economic growth by 2100—and have only a marginal impact on reducing the at-risk malaria population. By contrast, we could spend $3 billion a year on mosquito nets, environmentally safe indoor DDT sprays, and subsidies for new therapies—and within 10 years cut the number of malaria infections by half. In other words, for the money it would take to save one life with carbon cuts, smarter policies could save 78,000 lives." BJORN LOMBORG
Unfortunately, to environmentalists a perceived non-threat to polar bears is a bigger deal than a real threat to an African child.

More Al Gore misinformation: Several weeks ago, Mr. Gore claimed on a TV talk show that the earth's core was millions of degrees hot, and at the Copenhagen climate change summit, he claimed new computer modelling suggesting a 75% chance of the entire polar ice cap melting during the summertime by 2014. However, Dr. Wieslav Maslowski, the climatologist whose work the prediction was based on, refuted his claims. “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at. I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this,” said Maslowski. Go home, Al. Buy a smaller home. Make a smaller footprint. You are an embarrassment.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

A high tech net for volunteers

I hope everyone contributing to buy nets and t-shirts noticed the article about malaria in today's Wall St. Journal. It's about high tech epidemiology and volunteers who help with malaria vaccine modeling. The simulations could take months or years as millions die or become disabled by a disease that about 30 years ago had practically been conquered. That is until Rachel Carson told about her vision of a silent spring, and DDT as a killer of mosquitoes that spread the disease was essentially taken off the market. In its place we have bed nets and local spraying, and do-gooders buying orange t-shirts and having basketball games and bake sales to feel like they're doing something. Meanwhile, millions of children, mostly black and brown, mostly poor, mostly not using bed-nets because they aren't accessible, are dying.

So while they slice and dice the genes of the female mosquito becoming famous for writing articles in peer review journals, they can only hope for that enzyme that will cure the disease. But doesn't volunteering just feel so good? Isn't that what counts? The feeling, not the results?

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Malaria, DDT and children who are dying today

Westerners must look like the most evil, inhumane specters of death to 3rd world peoples. We tell developing countries not to spray their swamps and villages or wait on industrialization so we won't breathe their dirty air, so we can continue on our merry way in pursuit of climate control. I'm surprised they didn't boot Hillary right out of India with her pandering about clean air and global warming sop. We don't have enough wind mills to even power the electric cars being built, nor do we have a dump for the batteries or the mercury filled light bulbs made in coal fired plants in China.

And then there's the Boston Globe reporter who writes that DDT makes him shudder. Really? Has he ever seen children dying of malaria or adults disabled by it? Now that should make him shudder.
    “Why do we sit around looking for the impact on things we cannot see when we have the problem we can see right now?’’ Abwang Bernard said. “We have 5-year-old children dying. Many people have four episodes of malaria a year. They miss weeks and weeks of work. They cannot feed their families. Why not protect them for their future?

    “I understand the environmental arguments, but sometimes they cry so much fear, their arguments become inhuman to the people. It’s almost like they want the people to perish for the animals. No chemical has no side effects. But let us first reduce infant mortality. That is the environment I care about right now.’’

Saturday, May 23, 2009

WHO is killing Africans and why

"In 2006, after 25 years and 50 million preventable deaths, the World Health Organization reversed course and endorsed widespread use of the insecticide DDT to combat malaria. So much for that. Earlier this month, the U.N. agency quietly reverted to promoting less effective methods for attacking the disease. The result is a victory for politics over public health, and millions of the world's poor will suffer as a result. Malaria, politics and DDT

Sadly, it's not just misguided environmentalists with an agenda, many Christian groups have bought into the bed net scam, too. But then, many European Christians of the 17th century thought slavery in the New World was saving Africans from going to hell in the Old--and the DDT ban has killed far more people than the trans-Atlantic slave trade ever did.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Our President was born in a backward time

Lucky for him. His unmarried 17 year old American mother didn't abort him--abortions were accessible but not easy in the 1960s. And his Kenyan father was old enough to have benefitted from DDT which was controlling malaria in his home country. For malaria statistics today, take a look at Kenya, and its under 50 life expectancy. Millions and millions of Africans died when DDT was removed from the market by environmentalists before there was an adequate replacement or plan. And those figures for treated bed nets don't look too promising either, do they? Less than 12% of the children under 5 are sleeping under treated materials in Kenya. And they are still blundering today with the lives of Africans. Where else but Africa can you find large pools of women at-risk-for-HIV on which to try out your iffy drug studies?

Friday, January 23, 2009

President Bush's malaria initiative

If you click on the link to the White House to learn about President Bush’s Malaria Initiative (PMI), a U.S. government initiative designed to cut malaria deaths in half in target countries in sub-Saharan Africa, you'll get the Obama White House and no information--or it is buried in another topic. It was announced on June 30, 2005, when President Bush pledged to increase U.S. funding of malaria prevention and treatment in sub-Saharan Africa by more than $1.2 billion over 5 years. The five years isn't up yet, so there's no telling where the money went. All White House links were changed by January 20, 2009, so if you linked there for information or data or speeches, I doubt that the links are archived. Worldwide, malaria causes around 350 to 500 million illnesses and more than one million deaths annually, but it is particularly devastating in Africa, where it kills an African child every 30 seconds.

Environmentalists in their eagerness to save bird eggs based on the tales (Silent Spring) of a non-scientist, have killed more Africans than Atlantic slave trade. Bush's efforts can't undo the hasty removal of DDT before an alternative could be found, but they can help. The money, our money, provides for technical and programmatic strategies, training and supervision of health workers, laboratories, communications, monitoring and evaluation, and surveillance systems as well as house spraying and bed nets. Of course, killing the mosquito eggs would have been better and cheaper, but lives will be saved--eventually.
    In Africa, at least one million children under-5 die each year from malaria. The President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI), a five-year, $1.2 billion program, announced by President George W. Bush in June 2005, aims to cut malaria deaths by 50 percent in 15 of the hardest-hit African countries. Photo gallery
I doubt that this link will be available long. Laura Bush's efforts for malaria victims are still on America.gov, but will probably disappear. Each first lady choses her own defining activity. Remember Lady Bird's beautification projects--and billboards just got larger? Digital history is very iffy--regardless of who's in power. It takes a long time to burn a library, but digital archives can be wiped out with a computer stroke. And even paper archives can be stuffed into socks and stolen. I wonder if President Bush will ever get the credit he deserves? Or if the program will be continued?

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Rachel Carson

will apparently be appearing this week at Lakeside in the portrayal by Cathy Kaemmerlen. She'll go on without me. The blurb says, "In 1962, Carson wrote Silent Spring, which exposed the hazards of the pesticide DDT. As a result, DDT came under closer governmnt supervision and was eventually banned." Of course, not a single person has ever died from exposure to (or even eating) DDT. But the result of the ban is that more Africans have died of malaria than were killed in the transatlantic slave trade. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth also lays on misinformation about malaria--says global warming is increasing it. That's also untrue. In fact, our own Washington DC used to be a swampy mess of mosquitoes and malaria. You don't need a warm climate to have malaria. Millions of African children continue to die or live a disabled life due to our environmental movement that puts animals and plants above people. Pesticide soaked bed nets? Would you put your child under one?

A few weeks ago we had a series here on global health, and although I only attended the one by a scientist (Dick Slemons) I know and trust, the usual about health even in JAMA is all about the gap--that some have poor health because we have good health. I noticed the following at what I assume is a libertarian site (since Republicans haven't sounded like this in decades)
    Arguments based on inequality are, at root, made from a misunderstanding - willful or otherwise - of the way in which wealth, medicine and technology are best created. Rapid progress for all requires a free market, strong rule of law and property rights. Such a culture necessarily has a power law distribution of ownership and success. There's a reason the US has led the world in technology, for all that it's going to the dogs nowadays - it's the flip side of the reason that communism, socialism and the politics of envy lead to poverty and suffering.

    Creating "equality" by taking from the successful ruins the creation of wealth - very much a non-zero sum game - for all. It takes away the vital incentives and rewards for success. At the end of the process, as demonstrated by all that transpired in the Soviet Union, you are left with the same old inequalities, but now taking place amongst ruins, starvation and disease.

    Economic ignorance is the death of cultures; it is presently eating away at the US, and is sadly most advanced in medicine and medical research. People who favor equality and envy over wealth and progress are, unfortunately, usually comparatively wealthy themselves and thus largely insulated from the short-term consequences of their ignorance. These dangerous philistines will have to decide in the years ahead whether their dearly-held positions are worth losing their lives to, not to mention the lives of everyone they manage to kill - at the rate of 100,000 with each and every day of delay on the way to working anti-aging technologies. Fight aging

Friday, May 30, 2008

Kill the children, save the trade of Silent Spring

That's what environmentalists in rich western nations do. Here's an article from a 2007 Lancet.
    In September, 2006, WHO recommended wider use of indoor spraying with dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT)—once banned because of its toxic effects on the environment—and other insecticides to control malaria. Since then, a number of African countries have made their old foe DDT their new friend. Malawi is the latest, announcing last week that it would be introducing indoor residual spraying with DDT in its fight against malaria.
So what's the problem? While we wait for science and technology to find a cheap, effective vaccine or drug, why can't the lives of African children be saved? Agricultural products will be banned. That's how powerful the environmentalists are. Maybe one of the children saved might have grown up to find the answers. Very short sighted, these liberals.
    Agricultural exporters in some African countries have already raised concerns. They claim that their produce will be banned from the EU if DDT is used for indoor residual spraying. It would be devastating if the health and economic gains of controlling malaria were offset by a deleterious effect on countries' economies. But fears of a ban appear to be unjustified. Last year, the EU said it would not automatically ban imports from countries if DDT is found to exceed tolerated levels. They will, however, stop consignments containing residues above their maximum limits, which are around five to ten times lower than for countries such as the USA and Japan. EU policy may need a rethink if food imports from countries using DDT for indoor residual spraying are turned away for levels of the insecticide that are not considered harmful by other countries. The global community should ensure that DDT poisons only malarial mosquitoes and not Africa's economy.Lancet, 2007; 369:248
I suppose this is one way to keep Africa from competing for energy resources--just kill them off or make them so weak they can't do anything but fight each other. Rachel Carson's legacy.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Conservative Christians will be blamed

As the election heats up, we'll hear all sorts of nonsense and sneaky asides about the power of the Christian right. I'm sure Huckabee will get a few slurs just because he was a Baptist minister in his past life. I guess it brings out voters, because it sure worked in Ohio in 2006. We elected a liberal governor, a former Methodist minister. Oh, that it were true that Christians stood on biblical principles--or that they even flooded the polls on election day. Christians haven't been able to roll back anything. Here's what I wrote in March, and so far, no one has challenged it.
    . . . liberals try to put up conservatives, particularly Christian conservatives, as some sort of powerhouse bringing down the government. No one has been a bigger spender on social programs than the Bush administration (especially education). Medicare. Biggest gains under Republicans. Illegal immigration. Huge muck job by Republicans--who was president in 1986 for IRCA? Social Security. Reagan was President when I lost mine. Legal abortion. Last time I checked, we're still killing babies--what--25-35 million since Roe v. Wade? If Christian conservatives manage to roll back a week or two in a sparsely populated rural state, the Dems go crazy ("oh no, a baby's made it out alive"), but the law's still there. DDT. Last time I ran the numbers, we'd killed more Africans with malaria in the last 30 years than died being shipped across the Atlantic as slaves in the 18th century, but not a single bird, let alone human, ever died from spraying DDT on mosquito eggs in standing pools of swamp water. . . Clean air laws. We've got bunches of empty factories in Ohio that have no smoke belching from the chimneys--the jobs went first to the southern U.S.A., then to Asia. Women's Rights. Leading cause of poverty in the U.S.A. is unmarried women having sex and babies before finishing school. The poverty gap is no longer racial, it is marital. And Democrats have a fainting spell if someone introduces an abstinence program or a chastity pledge
I'm waiting for someone to outline all the programs demanded, introduced or defeated by conservative Christians which have changed our culture as much as the above items.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

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.

Friday, October 12, 2007

4209

Al Gore and the piece prize

The Canadian Press reports:
    “Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change jointly won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for fighting it.

    Gore, who won an Academy Award earlier this year for his film on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," had been widely tipped to win the prize.

    He said that global warming was not a political issue but a worldwide crisis.”
Al Gore is a big fan of Rachel Carson, who whipped up another crisis 40 years ago--the long term effects of DDT on the environment. The woman has probably killed more Africans than the 17th and 18th century slave trade. Today malaria infects between 300 million and 500 million people annually, killing as many 2.7 million of them." Before Silent Spring, malaria was on the run. The debilitating effects of this disease help keep Africa in poverty.

"Without this book, the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never have developed at all," declared then-Vice President Albert Gore in his introduction to the 1994 edition of Silent Spring. The foreword to the 25th anniversary edition accurately declared, "It led to environmental legislation at every level of government." Now Gore can guarantee that the poor of the third world will never be competitive or catch up by keeping them barefoot but green. American businesses jumped on the green bus, they're rolling and are already making huge profits--how will Africa and Asia ever compete?

That Rachel Carson didn’t tell the truth about cancer in children (rate has not changed over many decades, but other deaths (polio, pneumonia, birth defects) went down skewing comparisons with other illnesses like cancer) is probably not her fault. She wasn’t a trained scientist. And neither is Al. Environmentalists don’t want to see that the EPA banning DDT killed or disabled millions of Africans--for what? So church groups can donate insecticide treated nets (would you sleep under one?) and wear orange t-shirts with slogans.



And now we have Growbal Warming.

See Silent Spring turns 40

Friday, August 17, 2007

4058

Confronting global warming fundamentalists and alarmists

There is no conservative theological basis for the current belief of environmentalists that humans [are] principally consumers and polluters rather than producers and stewards and that nature knows best, or that the earth, untouched by human hands is the ideal, according to this testimony by David Barton before the U.S. Senate Environment Committee
    "The reason for skepticism among the conservative religious community on the hotly debated issue of man-caused Global Warming is based on lengthy experience. Recall that twenty years ago the scientific community asserted that fetal tissue research held the solution for many of the world’s health problems; science eventually proved the opposite.

    Similarly, in the 1960s, environmental science alarmists warned that the Global Population Bomb would soon doom the entire planet and that by the year 2000, economic growth would be destroyed and there would be a worldwide unemployment crisis; yet the worldwide unemployment rate this year was at 6.3 percent – hardly a crisis by any measurement.

    In the 1960s, environmental science alarmists similarly claimed that DDT harmed humans and caused cancer, thus leading to a near worldwide ban on the use of DDT and now resulting in the deaths of between one and two million persons each year from malaria. In fact, four decades later, the scientific community still has found no harm to humans from DDT, so the World Health Organization, the Global Fund, and U.S.AID have once again endorsed the use of DDT in fighting malaria 20 – after millions of lives were needlessly lost.

    And let’s not forget that in the 1970s, aerosols were considered a leading cause of harm to the environment, but recent reports note that "Aerosols actually have a cooling effect on global temperatures” that helps “cancel out the warming effect of CO2." Environmental science has a demonstrated pattern of announcing strong conclusions, and then reversing itself following further time and study. . ."
Read the whole piece, with references which I've removed. Also, if you are a member of a main line protestant church, your left leaning leadership has bought into the alarmists' argument and may be pushing BUZZ orange t-shirts so 3rd world peoples can sleep under insecticide soaked nets.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Laura Bush

Despite being dissed by some cranky members of the American Library Association who don't know a good opportunity for positive PR when they see one, Laura Bush's numbers remain high. There is a great article about her in the Wall St. Journal week-end edition.
    Mrs. Bush nudges the conversation along toward a point she wants to make: Fighting disease in poor countries also pays other tangible benefits, including expanding economic growth and liberating women. Sometimes this happens with the smallest of projects -- like providing clean drinking water to a school:

    "Especially the economic part of it, the girls who are kept out of school because they are the ones looking for water, or . . . have to walk however far to the water well and bring it back, and so they aren't in school. And that's one of the reasons the clean water, the PlayPumps [merry-go-round water pumps] that we inaugurated in Zambia are very important -- and they're in a schoolyard -- so that if girls don't have to search for water for their families, they're more likely to be educated."

    If reporters pay close attention to what she says and follow up on it, they are likely to find that Mrs. Bush is willing to take controversial stands. On her recent flight to Africa, she told journalists traveling with her that the U.S. needs to be "efficient and effective" with foreign aid money. No one on the plane asked what she meant.

    For one thing, she supports using the most effective defense ever developed against malaria -- an insecticide called DDT, which has been vilified by environmentalists even though it was essential to eradicating the disease in the U.S. decades ago."
You go girl! Article here.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

3914

Fill in the blank

"It seems incomprehensible that authorities in a scientific discipline would be unaware of the wealth of data in the scientific literature that contradict the basis for its official position on"
    dietary fat intake

    global warming

    global cooling

    malaria control

    acid rain

    market forces

    ethanol for fuel

    alar

    HRT

    stem cell research

    gender differences

    fossil record

    human behavior

    safety

    and so forth
Comment extracted from the Ottobonis' article in Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, vol. 12, no. 1, Spring 2007, p. 12 concerning the WHI low fat diet study.