Posted on 08/06/2016 4:29:09 AM PDT by VitacoreVision
Jane Orient, M.D., serves as the Executive Director of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). This Arizona-based organization attracts conservative-thinking doctors and frequently finds itself in disagreement with the well-known American Medical Association.
Dr. Orient has issued a call to start using DDT in the fight against the Zika virus. Her stand places her in marked contrast to an assortment of leftist environmentalists and their political allies. To them, DDT is harmful. But examination of the claims that DDT adversely affects people, plant life, and fish shows the worries to be unreasonable if not completely false.
Created in 1874 by a German chemist, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane wasn’t found to be an effective insecticide until 1939 when Swiss chemist Paul Müller started publicizing its usefulness as an eradicator of mosquitoes and various vermin. Müller justifiably won the 1948 Nobel Prize “for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several anthropods.”
Soon after the acknowledgement of Müller’s work, use of DDT became widespread. Typhus that had ravaged U.S. forces during World War II was largely eliminated. In the United States, sickness and death caused by malaria shrank from 15,000 cases in 1947 to compete eradication by 1951. The use of DDT in Africa and elsewhere proved sensationally effective against malaria and other mosquito borne diseases. The use of DDT, says Dr. Orient, probably saved 500,000,000 lives without killing anyone.”
In 1962, however, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring gave birth to a campaign against DDT that has led to the substance being banned for use in the United States and much of the world. Carson predicted that vegetation would disappear, fish would no longer be found in rivers and streams, birds would no longer be found, and people would face grave dangers. DDT became Enemy Number One and its use became illegal in 1972 via an EPA mandate. Soon, the United Nations joined the U.S. in condemning DDT and using it ceased in many parts of the world.
In Florida today, frantic efforts to eradicate the Zika virus have dominated our nation’s print and electronic media. Numerous athletes have declined to participate in the Olympic Games over fear of mosquito bites transmitting the Zika virus and more. To combat the threat, medical authorities are turning to everything but DDT.
“If we do nothing,” says Dr. Orient, “a lot of people will get Zika [and] some will get Guillain Barre Syndrome which causes a potentially fatal paralysis.” Labeling as a “step above nothing” the current strategy of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) — don’t get pregnant, wear long sleeve clothing, and apply a mosquito repellent — she laments the refusal to employ DDT to deal with the problem. Everything offered by the CDC and others isn’t working very well according to the AAPS leader. What would work? With a willingness to stick her neck out, Dr. Orient says it may be “the height of political incorrectness to suggest trying DDT.” But that’s what she believes would be effective.
Why did the ban on DDT develop and become virtually mandatory? Population control seems to be the hidden goal of some. In the 1960s, Environmental Defense Fund leader Dr. Charles Wurster claimed there were already too many people on earth. He proposed banning DDT “as a way to get rid of them.” In his syndicated column, Walter Williams noted that Malthusian Club founder Alexander King had written in 1990: “So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” In November 1991, the Paris-based UNESCO Courier published the proposal of famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, who called for action to “eliminate 350,000 people per day” as the way to counter population growth. Others claiming to be environmentalists have issued similarly outrageous statements.
The existing ban on DDT should be terminated. Perhaps the current scare presented by the Zika virus will lead again to the use of this remarkable and safe substance.
Related Articles:
Documentary Exposes the Horrific Human Cost of the DDT Ban
There are vaccines Gardasil and other drugs FDA approved that are more dangerous than DDT.
Look up all those Osteoporosis drugs, all are FDA Flagged and Foreto is also black boxed for Bone Cancer.
Wonder Warthog wrote: in response to rockingham
Evidence, please. You certainly spout the eco-propaganda well, but I have seen no evidence to support either of these
DDT was grossly over used (I am from S. Louisiana, and remember the government “bombing” campaign, dropping DDT-laced cornmeal from airplanes in an effort to stop the spread of fire ants (failed)), but it should be available for limited uses...the total ban is stupid in the extreme.
Amen!
Thank You for that contribution
Should also bring back 612 insect repellant.
I did the very same, except I was on my bicycle.
...BINGO...Odungo wants 2 billion to fight zeka..
but only half to be accountable ( to fight zeka) He refuses to say where the rest of the money would go....my guess, more money for terrorist sponsor IRAN
Well, millions of deaths in third world countries wasn’t reason enough to bring it back, maybe the threat of liberals ‘little snookums’ pregnant daughters contracting Zika might overcome their Rachel Carson lying BS and allow it to get reapproved.
Nah. Won’t happen. Not in a million years. They would rather see their own grandchildren or children deformed and die before saying they were wrong about DDT.
Claims for which are plentiful histrionics as authentication.
While in college in Appalachia in the early 60’s children were routinely given a spoonfull of DDT to kill internal parasites. This had been going on for decades with no apparent ill affects. The owner of the manufacturing plant producing DDT routinely ingested DDT as proof of its harmlessness. The fact remains tens of millions of children have died of typhus and other mosquito borne diseases since DDT was banned. Its elimination has had the desired affect of murdering millions of black children.
“When I was a kid living in the Tampa Bay area while my dad was deployed to Korea, we used to ride behind the fogger trucks on our bikes. “
A ritual for kids living in swampy areas and a highlight of a summer night.
Great book I can recommend: The Really Inconvenient Truths: "Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You To Know About"
Informative and entertaining at the same time. One of those seven catastrophes is the banning of DDT. Just one part of it, the effect the ban had on the Elm population in the USA when Dutch Elm Disease got a foothold was stunning. (this is from memory...) DDT was the only thing that effectively combated the beetle. They had one guy working for a town who dusted his trees in a public park with DDT, and they didn't lose a tree for something like ten years. Then around 1968 or so (shortly before the ban) green activists in his town browbeat the elected officials, who then banned the use of DDT "to be ahead of the curve". He had to purchase far more expensive substitutes that didnt work, and he eventually ended up losing all the trees.
DDT was proven totally successful in eliminating mosquitoes from infested swamps during the construction of the Panama canal thus making that project possible. The Dept of Ag under LBJ banned the substance as a farm product in spite of significant and substantial findings in a court of law that there was no harm in the use of DDT and that, in fact, it had substantial benefits to the health and well being, especially of poor and rural people in the south.
DDT was banned to get the early environmentalists off LBJ’s back. These were the same people and organizations that sought the means through Planned Parenthood and the War on Poverty to destroy the black population in the US.
In spite of spurious, superficial claims DDT has never been scientifically demonstrated to be other than a boon to health and well being.
DDT ban was because some study said that it caused eagle egg shells to be thin.
Wind Generators get a free pass to chop up eagles for the next 30 years.
Yes we are stupid.
If Black Lives Really Matter DDT would have been brought back many years ago. Disgusting that the things that actually prevent the most deaths of blacks...restricting abortions, ddt and the second amendment.....the left is against.
Same here, growing up on Barksdale AFB in La.
No. With Zika, people are born democrats.
Yeah, we used to ride our bikes in the DDT clouds behind the fogger truck, just to watch the ‘skeeters die and drop from the air.
Popcorn salt (it’s a finer grind of regular table salt) worked into the carpet effectively kills flea larva.
Takes a while to wipe out the population, but it does work.
Do your remember alar? Insecticide for apple growers? Apples banned from school lunchrooms? Big freaking to-do about it back when America wanted to export apples to places like Japan.
Check out what some of the Japanese grown gift wrapped pampered apples cost or used to cost. Then think about it.
Yeah, but Malaria only affect those darker skinned people in distant lands, Zika is serious, it could affect the beltway...
Fooking Holier-than-thou liberals.
I notice the author says nothing about birds. Odd, since that's where the negative effects are most noticeable.
Yup. Follow the money...
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