Beware!!!

Use the mosquito nets but spray DDT too.

There is a commercial on television that shows a soccer player practicing an indirect kick against cutout man-sized opponents. He kicks the ball with a real nice bend in it to the right side of the goal and beans a grounds keeper who is pushing something; probably laying down the goal line or something. Then a caption is shown which reads “We need nets”. The commercial goes on to say that 3000 children a day could be saved from malaria if they had mosquito nets.

DDT is banned just about everywhere except in South Africa for sure and maybe some other nations. When I returned from Johannesburg to London last year the flight attendants sprayed something up to the ceiling of the plane before we took off. They announced that this action was for mosquito control. They didn’t say it was DDT but I’m betting it was.

Some background information:

"In May 1955 the Eighth World Health Assembly adopted a Global Malaria Eradication Campaign based on the widespread use of DDT against mosquitos and of antimalarial drugs to treat malaria and to eliminate the parasite in humans. As a result of the Campaign, malaria was eradicated by 1967 from all developed countries where the disease was endemic and large areas of tropical Asia and Latin America were freed from the risk of infection. The Malaria Eradication Campaign was only launched in three countries of tropical Africa since it was not considered feasible in the others. Despite these achievements, improvements in the malaria situation could not be maintained indefinitely by time-limited, highly prescriptive and centralized programmes." [Bull World Health Organ 1998;76(1):11-6]

"To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT... In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable." [National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Research in the Life Sciences of the Committee on Science and Public Policy. 1970. The Life Sciences; Recent Progress and Application to Human Affairs; The World of Biological Research; Requirements for the Future.]

Rachel Carson, who was born in Springdale, PA and after whom a Pittsburgh bridge will be named, sounded the initial alarm against DDT. Unfortunately she misrepresented the science of DDT in her 1962 book Silent Spring. Carson wrote "Dr. DeWitt's now classic experiments [on quail and pheasants] have now established the fact that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction. Quail into whose diet DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched." DeWitt's 1956 article (in Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry) actually yielded a very different conclusion. Quail were fed 200 parts per million of DDT in all of their food throughout the breeding season. DeWitt reports that 80% of their eggs hatched, compared with the "control" birds (those not fed DDT) which hatched 83.9% of their eggs. Carson also omitted mention of DeWitt's report that "control" pheasants hatched only 57 percent of their eggs, while those that were fed high levels of DDT in all of their food for an entire year hatched more than 80% of their eggs.

And here’s a shocking revelation. Population control advocates (call them social “scientists” if you like, but all population control advocates are liberals – conservatives value life and conservative capitalists see lots of sales in big population) blamed DDT for increasing third world population. In the 1960s, World Health Organization authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem but to assure than up to 40 percent of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the Agency for International Development stated, "Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing." [Desowitz, RS. 1992. Malaria Capers, W.W. Norton & Company]
The environmental movement used DDT as a means to increase their power. Charles Wurster, chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, commented, "If the environmentalists win on DDT, they will achieve a level of authority they have never had before. In a sense, much more is at stake than DDT." [Seattle Times, October 5, 1969]

There’s a lot more information on this available elsewhere so I won’t go on. But be advised that more than1 million people, mostly children, die every year because DDT was banned. There was no science to justify the ban.

My point is this: Beware of junk science and the people who use the conclusions derived from it to influence (force) you to do things that are ill-advised. The “more CO2 = global warming” are using junk science to make their cases. And beware of liberals – if they can’t convince you, they’ll force you.