Bush highlights malaria campaign

BBC ^ | 18 Feb 2008 | BBC

[BGHater]

Mr Bush handed out bed nets on his visit to Arusha President George W Bush has said the US will help provide 5.2 million mosquito nets as part of a broader campaign to tackle malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. Mr Bush announced the plan during a visit to a hospital in Arusha, Tanzania, where he is on the second leg of a tour of five African countries. He said it would provide free nets for every Tanzanian child aged one to five. Malaria is the main cause of death for children in Africa, killing a child every 30 seconds, the UN says. The US, Tanzania and the Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria will distribute the nets. "This is one of the simplest technologies imaginable, but it's also one of the most effective," Mr Bush said after visiting the Meru District Hospital. "It is unacceptable to people here in Africa, who see their families devastated and their economies crippled," he said. "It is unacceptable to people in the United States who believe every human life has value, and that the power to save lives comes with the moral obligation to use it." In 2005 President Bush launched a $1.2bn (£610m) five-year campaign to lower malaria deaths in Africa. One in every five childhood deaths in Africa is due to the effects of the disease, according to the World Health Organization.

[TChris]

You blasted morons! Lift the ban on DDT already!!!

How many more have to die first?

[svcw]

How about this, lets go back to using DDT to get rid of these pesky mosquitoes.

[hometoroost]

They’d be better off handing out some DDT. Good old Rachel Carson has been responsible for as many deaths or more as Hitler. Won’t see him on a postage stamp any time soon though.

[svcw]

I read somewhere (sorry can not remember) that 10 million people have died as a result of malaria because of the banning of DDT.

[mnehrling]

[UCFRoadWarrior]

Gosh everyone beat me with the “DDT” comments....

Boosh keeps going liberal. Nets do nothing when people are outside. DDT does

Nutty liberal globalism running amok again

[Kimmers]

Europe and North America have not harbored malarial mosquitoes since the 1940s. In one of the most miraculous public health developments in history, Greece saw malaria cases drop from 1-2 million cases a year to close to zero, also thanks to DDT. Meanwhile, in India, malaria deaths went from nearly a million in 1945 to only a few thousand in 1960. In what is now Sri Lanka, malaria cases went from 2,800,000 in 1948, before the introduction of DDT, down to 17 in 1964 — then, tragically, back up to 2,500,000 by 1969, five years after DDT use was discontinued there.

http://www.acsh.org/healthissues/newsID.442/healthissue_detail.asp

[kittymyrib]

Rachel Carson has killed as many people with her book The Silent Spring as Pol Pot did in Cambodia. That a US President should take part in this nets charade is sickening.

[AFPhys]

I have no problems with the nets, I hope that for every net, they provide a couple hundred pounds of DDT.

[kidd]

I read somewhere (sorry can not remember) that 10 million people have died as a result of malaria because of the banning of DDT.

That would be a low-side estimate. More like 50 million.

http://www.eco-imperialism.com/content/article.php3?id=92

http://www.jpands.org/vol9no3/edwards.pdf

[PhilDragoo]

So by being politically correct and enviromentally friendly the DDT-banning pinheads murder one million innocents a year.

Who needs science--it's another Dark Age Because-We-Say-So tale--like Global Warming.

[AFPhys]

The World Health Organization reversed the environmentalist-promoted ban on DDT in 2006

[GovernmentShrinker]

Save the wildlife (yes, I know the harm to wildlife from DDT has often been wildly exaggerated, but it’s still real to a significant extent), and tell the people that they need to get their act together. Civilization is a much more powerful anti-malarial agent than DDT, and lack of civilization is the main reason for the persistence of endemic malaria in Africa, and for the high death rate from malaria.

Look at the history of malaria in the US. Used to be endemic in the South, and was almost entirely wiped out BEFORE the introduction of DDT. And I had malaria twice as a preschooler, living in Rwanda while my father worked for the embassy there. Needless to say, I didn’t die, and that’s not a coincidence or some magical Caucasian immunity to it, and I didn’t have access to a Western-trained doctor. We kept our house and our food and our bodies clean, kept our window and door screens intact and closed, so weren’t constantly infected with other serious diseases on top of malaria, and my parents did not reproduce beyond the limits of their ability to feed their family so we weren’t suffering from malnutrition.

The extremely high death rate reported from malaria in Africa isn’t just from malaria, but from the laundry list of poor health and nutrition practices which are just as epidemic as malaria. In some areas, a lot of kids are born with AIDS, but when they die following a bout of malaria, the cause is given as malaria.

[TChris]

The World Health Organization reversed the environmentalist-promoted ban on DDT in 2006

Yes, they did.

The EPA in the US should get around to lifting its ban sometime in 2039, once a billion or so people have died from Malaria.

[AFPhys]

Since 1972, malaria has resulted in nearly 100 million largely preventable deaths.

Check out this web page -
The Malaria Clock:
A Green Eco-Imperialist Legacy of Death
http://www.junkscience.com/malaria_clock.html

[TChris]

I know the harm to wildlife from DDT has often been wildly exaggerated, but it’s still real to a significant extent

No, it isn't real. The bird egg shell thinning study has since been debunked, and there hasn't been any other study to prove real harm to anything from DDT, except mosquitoes.

[GovernmentShrinker]

You need to re-check the timelines of malaria disappearance and DDT introduction in the US. I don’t know about Europe, but malaria was nearly wiped in the US before DDT was introduced, and its downward trajectory probably would have continued, had DDT not been introduced. The pro-DDT crowd often rivals the anti-DDT crowd when it comes to wild exaggerations of the effects of DDT.

[M203M4]

A big bump to this. In addition to again placing much of humanity at greater exposure to the perils of disease and hunger, the ecofascists derailed clean energy and energy independence (nuclear power). They are anti-human, anti-technology luddites. The "Green" movement will be responsible for a death toll orders of magnitude greater than that borne of all totalitarian governments combined, with their persistently primitivist anti-GMO, anti-DDT, anti-nuclear, anti-nanotech, anti-animal-testing, anti-meat, anti-logging, etc views.

To them, humanity is an infection of the earth (a living organism in their view) which should be "cured". The analogy is adopted almost religiously by some, who view 'global warming' as the earth's "fever" to fight off the infection, bad weather as specific "immune responses", and so on. The left's pro-abortion, anti-child, pro-homo, anti-capitalist, and similar convictions dovetail perfectly with the rest of their perverted envirofascist views.

[Amos the Prophet]

DDT has never been proven to have any negative effects on anything except mosquitoes.
Children in Appalachia ate DDT by the spoonfull through the 60’s to control internal parasites.
The opposition of the environmental movement to DDT was muscle flexing aimed at reducing the impact of humans on the environment through natural selection. It was felt that DDT provided an unfair advantage to humans in their battle against insect born disease.
There was never any evidence that DDT was injurious. There was never a case of disease among plant workers where DDT was manufactured.
By all accounts DDT was a miracle and a blessing. It was for that reason that anti-human environmental extremists sought to have it banned.
Against all scientific and medical advice it was baned in the 60’s as a sop to environmental extremism. The Endangered Species act followed quickly. Both have been disasterous in their effects on the health, economics and property rights of average citizens.

[AFPhys]

A massive DDT spraying program was used to eliminate malaria in the US:
http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/history/eradication_us.htm

The National Malaria Eradication Program, a cooperative undertaking by State and local health agencies of 13 Southeastern States and the Communicable Disease Center of the U. S. Public Health Service, originally proposed by Dr. L. L. Williams, commenced operations on July 1, 1947. The program consisted primarily of DDT application to the interior surfaces of rural homes or entire premises in counties where malaria was reported to have been prevalent in recent years. By the end of 1949, over 4,650,000 house spray applications had been made. Total elimination of transmission was slowly achieved. By 1951, CDC gradually withdrew from active participation in the operational phases of the program and shifted to its interest to surveillance, and in 1952, CDC participation in operations ceased altogether.

A major commitment was to the malaria control and assessment activities associated with the Tennessee Valley Authority. The advent of World War II necessitated the control of malaria in and around the many military bases located in malarious areas, primarily in Southeastern U. S. These efforts were so successful that at the end of the war and the founding of CDC, one of the initial tasks was to oversee the completion of the elimination of malaria as a major public health problem. In 1949, the country was declared free of malaria as a significant public health problem.

The role of CDC became one of surveillance within the U. S. and of assistance in the world-wide efforts to eliminate or control malaria in the economically underdeveloped areas of the world.

Malaria had been endemic in the US until the late 1940’s. Most of the transmission occurred in the southeastern states. (From this derives the fact that CDC, originally derived from malaria control operations, is located in Atlanta, Georgia).

[AFPhys]

Right, most who are infected survive. However, the number of infections is so huge, that even though about 149 out of 150 infected survive (see link in post#16) the number of deaths has climbed to near 100million since the 1972 ban/discrediting of DDT. The saddest thing is that this ought to have been eradicated world wide decades ago.

[17th Miss Regt]

The greenies are all Planned Parenthood types. Your points are valid, but banning DDT was all about killing large numbers of eugenically undesirable elements. The thinning of eggshells was a convenient fig leaf.

[Taffini]

from the center for disease control:

“In the last decade, the prevalence of malaria has been escalating at an alarming rate, especially in Africa. An estimated 300 to 500 million cases each year cause 1.5 to 2.7 million deaths,

[Taffini]

rachel carson, pick a circle in hell and throw her into it, if she isn’t there already

[Nailbiter]

DDT would solve this problem

[GovernmentShrinker]

Except that malaria was almost gone by the time the DDT program started. There’s a great research article on this but I can’t find a non-subscription copy on the Internet — see first page here: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-1753%28199603%2987%3A1%3C1%3AKADDDA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D&size=LARGE&origin=JSTOR-enlargePage
Sure DDT wiped out the last few pockets, mainly very poor rural areas where the standards of nutrition and hygiene were similar to current African standards. And it was only effective in those pockets because it was already gone in all the surrounding areas — DDT got rid of it quickly, before mosquitos could develop resistance, because there was no re-infection from surrounding areas, and it stayed gone after DDT use stopped for the same reason. Widespread DDT use in Africa in the 1950s resulted in the rapid development of DDT resistance in the mosquito population. It was stopped because it wasn’t working.

The TVA malaria control activities began in 1933 and had already virtually completely eliminated malaria in the Tennessee Valley by the time the DDT program began in 1947 (per CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/history/index.htm see paragraph on TVA about half way down the page).

The myth that “DDT is a magic bullet that can save millions of Third World people from dying of malaria” is right up there with the “global warming is going to start killing us all very soon” myth, when it comes to scientific validity. Just because hysterical environmentalists hate something doesn’t automatically mean it’s a wonderful thing that rational people should embrace.