Posted on 08/20/2004 6:50:59 AM PDT by Graybeard58
Rarely does a day go by without some scientist, journalist or international agency proclaiming another potentially catastrophic consequence of global warming. The latest disaster scenario -- mosquitoes spreading malaria -- combined all three doomsayers, but was no less specious than the rest.
A Reuters dispatch ("Malaria experts abuzz on global warming fears") told of U.N. scientists and others who believe rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels will mean hot, wet, tropical climates will encroach upon the upper latitudes, and bring with them blood-sucking, malaria-carrying mosquitoes and parasites that will wreak havoc on children. (This story contradicted one Reuters moved on Sept. 7, 2000, "Study suggests global warming won't spread malaria," which likewise was based on U.N. research.)
Of course, malaria has never been confined to the tropics. More than 600,000 Americans were infected in 1914, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the 1920s, 600,000 Russians died in an epidemic extending into Siberia and the Arctic Circle.
So the notion that global warming might introduce the disease to regions above the Tropic of Cancer is nonsense. Said Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, "Temperature is only one of many, many factors in malaria, and in many cases it's totally irrelevant. Many climate scientists don't know anything about the complexities of malaria." Still, warmists say Third World and developing nations with poor health-care systems could be overwhelmed by malaria outbreaks, and millions would die needlessly every year, U.N. "experts" contend.
It needn't happen that way, regardless of what turns the climate may take. Civilization has many strategies for stopping malaria, from building cities to draining swamps. But its greatest weapon, DDT, remains mostly holstered.
In May 1955, the World Health Organization began a campaign to eradicate malaria. Antimalarial drugs were administered to eliminate the parasite in humans, and DDT was used to control the breeding of mosquitoes that carried the disease. Within 12 years, malaria was eradicated from the developed countries where it had been endemic and from large swaths of tropical Asia, Latin America and Africa. So impressive were the results that the National Academy of Science in 1970 proclaimed: "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT."
Soon after, however, DDT was banned in most countries based on a spurious campaign by the emerging environmental left and population-control advocates. The former claimed the compound caused cancer in humans and heath and reproductive problems for wildlife. The latter said DDT was responsible for the population explosion in sub-Sahara Africa -- that is, DDT was preventing malaria from killing dark-skinned people. "Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing," a spokesman for the Agency for International Development said then.
William Ruckelshaus, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a former member of the hard-left Environmental Defense Fund, outlawed DDT's use in this country in 1972, and before long, most nations followed suit. Mr. Ruckelshaus' edict ignored his own department's findings and recommendations, not to mention his own assessment of the compound from 1971: DDT has "an exemplary record of safe use, does not cause a toxic response in man or other animals, and is not harmful. Carcinogenic claims regarding DDT are unproven speculation."
The Web site junkscience.com keeps a "malaria clock" that estimates the number of people afflicted and killed by malaria since Mr. Ruckelshaus "arbitrarily and capriciously banned DDT." The numbers are staggering: More than 12.8 billion have contracted malaria and 86.6 million have died, including nearly 78 million children and pregnant women.
Most of the suffering and heartache malaria has caused and might inflict was and remains easily preventable with judicious use of DDT, so that's one less global-warming bogeyman to worry about.
The malaria fear is VALID...but the cause is the fact that DDT has been banned by enviro-whackos and the mosquito and other infection bearing insects have proliferated since.
Millions of HUMANS have died because of the junk-science of these humanity hating radical ecologists.
Bring back DDT....every death is on the greenies....and their goddess Rachel Carlson
Their garbage bible "The Silent Spring"....
And then along comes the Trotskyesque Rifkinites....
Thanks, Mr. Rucklehaus . . . for 86+ million deaths from malaria; for West Nile Virus; for the spread of untold death and disease by mosquitoes.
Thanks enviro-whackos . . . for ensuring the continued unnecessary decimation of the human race by disease carried by pests whose populations could have been better controlled (if not eliminated) had DDT not been arbitrarily outlawed.
The argument is that Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring falsely accused the insecticide DDT of dangers to both human health and the environment, that this accusation led to the banning of DDT in mosquito control programs in areas where malaria is endemic (mostly the tropics), and as a direct result of this ban, millions of people died.
This argument is arrant nonsense, recycled from an article in Quadrant, in turn recycled from a number of unscientific and unsubstantiated websites. As professionals and teachers in the field of parasite disease control, we are only too well aware of how such rubbish can be transmuted from cyberspace junk to popular folklore. Your readers should be aware of the facts:
The manufacture and use of DDT was banned in the US in 1972, on the advice of the US Environmental Protection Agency. The use of DDT has since been banned in most other developed nations, but it is not banned for public health use in most areas of the world where malaria is endemic. Indeed, DDT was recently exempted from a proposed worldwide ban on organophosphate chemicals.
DDT usage for malaria control involves spraying the walls and backs of furniture, so as to kill and repel adult mosquitoes that may carry the malaria parasite. Other chemicals are available for this purpose, but DDT is cheap and persistent and is often a very effective indoor insecticide which is still used in many parts of the world.
DDT is not used for outdoor mosquito control, partly because scientific studies have demonstrated toxicity to wildlife, but mainly because its persistence in the environment rapidly leads to the development of resistance to the insecticide in mosquito populations. There are now much more effective and acceptable insecticides, such as Bacillus thuringiensis, to kill larval mosquitoes outdoors.
Reductions in the use of DDT did occur in a number of developing nations after the US ban in 1972. This reflected concerns over environmental consequences of DDT, but was also a result of many other factors. One of the important factors in declining use of DDT was decreasing effectiveness and greater costs because of the development of resistance in mosquitoes. Resistance was largely caused by the indiscriminate, widespread use of DDT to control agricultural pests in the tropics. This problem, in fact, was anticipated by Carson: "No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored . . . The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are rapidly making it worse."
Malaria is a major, ongoing disease problem in much of the developing world. Increases in the incidence of the disease have occurred for complex reasons. Reduced insecticide usage is one, but others include the resistance to treatment in both the parasite and the mosquito vectors, changes in land use that have provided new mosquito habitat, and the movement of people into new, high-risk areas.
Most nations where malaria is a problem, and most health professionals working in the field of malaria control, support the targeted use of DDT, as part of the tool kit for malaria control. Most also agree that more cost-effective, less environmentally persistent alternatives are needed. There are some effective alternative chemicals for the control of adult mosquitoes, but preventing their further development is lack of invest ment by industry, because malaria is largely a disease of the poor.
Malaria is responsible for enormous suffering and death. The facts are readily available in the scientific literature. To blame a reduction in DDT usage for the death of 10-30 million people from malaria is not just simple-minded, it is demonstrably wrong. To blame a mythical, monolithic entity called the environmental lobby for the total reduction in DDT usage is not just paranoid, it is also demonstrably wrong. Your article is not only poor journalism, it is an insult to the people who work for the control of parasitic diseases that afflict developing nations.
Dr Alan Lymbery
Professor Andrew Thompson
Parasitology Unit
Division of Health Sciences
Murdoch University (Australia)
Gee - so ya think that may be a 'canned response letter'?
No, it was written in direct response to an editorial in an Australian newspaper -- it just happens to be one of the clearest statements regarding DDT and malaria that I've seen. The main reason that people are still dying from malaria, and that millions have already died, is that not enough money has been spent on effective mosquito eradication and malarial prevention programs. It's a simple thing to blame it on the environmental movement and the DDT ban in developed countries, but even if it's simple, it's not true. AND... there are good reasons not to use DDT in a widespread (outdoor) fashion, because that invites the evolution of DDT-resistant mosquitoes, and then the indoor use of DDT wouldn't be an effective preventive measure.
So we need to keep the facts straight on this and advocate measures that will work. And then figure out who's going to pay for them.
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