Tag: DDT

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Internet's Hank
Internet's Hank
1717
 

“It is not half so important to know as it is to feel.” -Rachael Carson. For those of you who are trying to put a face to the name, Rachael Carson wrote the book Silent Spring, about the dangers of DDT. The subsequent DDT ban prevented malaria from being eradicated elsewhere in the globe like […]
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TeamAmerica
TeamAmerica
1611
 

Should we bring back DDT? On the front page of the April 29 issue of the WSJ there is an article about the Zika Virus and the severity of the birth defects it is causing. They are proving to be much worse than the results of non-Zika microcephaly. ” (Zika) eats away at the fetal […]
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Malarial Spring

George Savage
George Savage
3114
 

googledoodleGoogle today celebrates the 107th birthday of the patron saint of the environmental movement, Rachel Carson, with one of its occasional homepage “doodles.” The predictable result:  a torrent of favorable publicity for the “Mother of the Green Movement” and Silent Spring author who birthed the US Environmental Protection Agency and a global ban on the insecticide DDT.

Nearly lost in a sea of hagiographic links, an inconvenient truth can here and there be discerned: Banning DDT caused the avoidable death, by malaria, of at least 50 million human beings, mainly in the developing world. And the collateral damage continues today. As many as 2.7 million die each year of a disease that was on its way to obliteration prior to Carson’s profoundly unscientific campaign to ban a safe and effective insecticide.

Most of the world will learn nothing of the human toll taken by the resurgence of mosquito-borne disease in the wake of Carson’s political success. The typical take:

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