Posted on 09/14/2006 3:12:37 PM PDT by SmithL
The World Health Organization is poised to promote broader use of the controversial pesticide DDT in the battle against malaria.
Long banned in the United States because of environmental damage, DDT is used legally in a few impoverished countries to kill malaria-bearing mosquitoes. It's no longer sprayed outdoors, but indoors — to coat the inside walls of mud huts or other dwellings where mosquitoes lurk. The aim is to protect sleeping families from bites at night.
There has been little progress in recent years in preventing malaria, which sickens up to half a billion people annually and kills more than 1 million, mostly young children and mostly in Africa.
Now the WHO is strengthening its malaria-fighting campaign, to push more strongly for indoor spraying with a number of insecticides_ including DDT as a safe, effective and cheap option for countries to choose, say officials familiar with the announcement, to be made Friday in Washington.
"It's a big change," said biologist Amir Attaran of Canada's University of Ottawa, who has long pushed for the guidelines and described a recent draft. "There has been a lot of resistance to using insecticides to control malaria, and one insecticide especially. As of tomorrow, that will have to be reevaluated by a lot of people."
The WHO will say that "indoor residual spraying, including with DDT, has been underutilized, which has hampered international efforts to effectively combat malaria in Africa," said a Bush administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity in advance of the official announcement.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
should read "should be fewer people on the planet"
Will moonbats eat mosquitoes? Probably not, else Minnesota wouldn't have so many mosquitoes.
About damn time.
Even the DUmmies will understand.
I remember living in a nice apartmemt in Queens, NY that was cockroach free. The building had an incincerator and tossed garbage was constantly burned. Then the environs said this was dangerous to the air. So we wound up with no incincerators and roaches came by the millions. We moved because it was so hideous. We eventually moved upstate New York where we have some spiders and some mice (which our cats take care of), but nothing like horrible roaches.
Rachel Carson is responsible for turning my 11-year-old daughter into a conservative activist. She recently read (in a school workbook) about the great Rachel Carson. She was incensed and began to do her own research about environmentalists. We live in Africa, and she's seen, first-hand, the devastating effect of malaria on the families around us.
And the 40 million figure is since the early 1980s. I think Malaria had been virtually wiped out some time in the 1960s so the actual number of deaths is much higher than that.
There are already plenty of bats in Africa. (They're a delicacy.) They don't come close to controlling malaria-infected mosquitoes, though.
The Left has never cared for people with incorrectly-colored skin, except as useful puppets, and the proof is in the historical record.
Well isn't that sweet of them. How many have died in the meantime?
Well, isn't that peculiar, the WHO has signed off on DDT being sprayed on the inside of a mud hut, but not where mosquitos breed.
I've not the words.
When I was a youngster, the city fogged for mosquitos using who knows what.
Mosquitos were not a problem and I don't think I suffered much harm, actually life went on as normal.
Oh, I grew an eleventh toe.
/sarcasm
Does anyone know the exact "health organization" chappie who when querried about the deaths in the poorer nations which were sure to result from banning DDT, replied " - better dead than alive and riotiously reproducing."? ? ?
Rachel Carson, history's greatest mass murderer...
bout time. DDT is reason why malaria was eradicated in America and Spain. DDT was not harmful to humans. Still, I don't think DDT taste good. I believe it was Rachel Carson in the 1960s, who wrote Silent Spring. I have heard the claim of DDT and bird eggs, which is false. Hell has a special place for her.
2 million people die from malaria every year.
They are terrorists, like Al-Qaida, Hamas, and Hezbollah.
credit to Sen Tom Coburn of Oklahoma for pushing this agenda.
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