Posted on 08/21/2006 6:51:48 AM PDT by mathprof
Each year, malaria afflicts a half-billion people (roughly the population of North America) and kills a million of them (roughly the population of San Jose). And the latter is a low-end estimate. The actual number of fatalities is hard to pin down, since a body initially weakened by malaria becomes predisposed to other maladies.[snip]
The economist William Easterly calculates..."Preventing five million child deaths over the next ten years would cost just three dollars for each new mother," he writes in his book "The White Man's Burden."
Mr. Easterly argues that the tragic incompetence of the Western foreign aid industry...stems from its overly bureaucratic approach to problem-solving. Agencies like the World Health Organization, the Global Fund and the World Bank...see "poverty as a technical engineering problem that [their] answers will solve."[snip]
Indoor spraying of DDT is by far the cheapest and most effective way to control the disease. One South Africa province employing DDT saw malaria infections and deaths drop 96% over a three-year span.
Yet Rachel Carson-inspired environmentalists have convinced many public health agencies that the chemical is dangerous. African nations, fearful that lucrative European and U.S. markets might ban their agricultural exports, make do with less-effective DDT substitutes. Though DDT, like any chemical, can be harmful in high doses, there's no evidence that using it in the amounts needed to combat malaria has any ill-effect whatsoever on humans.
Mr. Laifer's been unable to spray DDT in any of his malaria-free zones. "It's the best thing in our arsenal," he says. "We have a prodigious supply, it's cheap and we know it works. Our world leaders need to legalize DDT, and people in America need to get mad about this. . . . We need to have people walking around with signs that say, 'DDT saves lives, environmentalists take lives.'"
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
yeah. and think of how much they'd save in abortion fees if...
MA is tough state to live in. Ignorant know-it-alls. You can't argue with 'em. I just smiled and changed the subject.
"Yet Rachel Carson-inspired environmentalists have convinced many public health agencies that the chemical is dangerous. "
It is. But malaria is much worse.
Our (PA)state Department of Environmental Protection building is actually named after her.....It grits me everytime I hear a reference to it....
Tammy Bruce writes about this too.
I can't get over the hostility of environmentalists to GMF. It is in direct contradiction to their desire to lessen the use of pesticides. Knee jerks.
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