Posted on 07/03/2002 4:09:24 AM PDT by backhoe
THE World Health Organisation, Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, the UN environmental programme and its development programme, USAID, and almost all the other international representatives of the great and the good now campaign against DDT.
But, perversely, the Third World still uses it. To those who believe that America under George W Bush and his gas-guzzling, permafrost-drilling accomplices is the source of all global pollution, this Third World defection is disappointing. Where are the virtuous blacks when we need them?
DDT was introduced as an insecticide during the 1940s. In Churchill's words: "The excellent DDT powder has been found to yield astonishing results against insects of all kinds, from lice to mosquitoes."
And astonishing they were. DDT was particularly effective against the anopheles mosquito, which is the carrier of malaria, and people once hoped that DDT would eradicate malaria worldwide. Consider Sri Lanka. In 1946, it had three million cases, but the introduction of DDT reduced the numbers, by 1964, to only 29. In India, the numbers of malaria cases fell from 75 million to around 50,000.
But, in 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the book that launched the environmental movement. In that book, Carson showed how DDT was imperilling wildlife, particularly predators at the top of the food chain that accumulated the chemical in their fat and in their thinning egg shells.
Within a decade, the developed countries had banned DDT, as did some developing countries, to the detriment of their health. In Sri Lanka, cases of malaria soon rose to 500,000. Worldwide, malaria has returned with a vengeance, accounting annually for 300 million cases and, sadly, one million deaths, mainly of children.
As the Third World now knows, there is no ready substitute for DDT. The spraying of houses with DDT prevents malaria because most people are infected after dusk as they sleep indoors. DDT permeates the walls of buildings, and a single spray will provide indoor protection for months.
Other chemicals are available, but they are generally less effective, shorter-acting and - most importantly for the Third World - more expensive. And DDT is extraordinarily safe for humans. Prof Kenneth Mellanby lectured on it for more than 40 years, and during each lecture he would eat a pinch.
Nor need DDT imperil wildlife. The destruction that Carson described was caused by the agricultural use of DDT as a mass insecticide in vast quantities on crops. But the discriminating application of DDT indoors involves only a tiny, contained, environmentally tolerable, reversible fraction of the dose. That is why some international health (as opposed to environmental) agencies, including Unicef, still support the judicious use of DTT. Even the WHO is now softening its stance.
Malaria was once endemic in Britain. Cromwell died of it and both Pepys and Shakespeare described it. Until the 1930s, it was still active in Essex. But we are lucky in our frosty climate, which kills anopheles, and we have eradicated the disease. Yet Greenpeace and other environmental agencies resist the appropriate use of DDT in the tropics.
Politics has long bedevilled malaria. Its first effective cure was quinine, which was discovered by Jesuit missionaries in South America during the 1630s, but for decades Protestants preferred to die rather than swallow "Jesuit's Powder". Today, Third World health is endangered by comfortable Western environmentalists, some of whom, discreetly, view black natives as threats to the local wildlife.
Supporting those black natives, however, are two researchers, Richard Tren and Roger Bate, whose Malaria and the DDT Story, recently published by the Institute for Economic Affairs in London, shows how to foster both a healthier and an environmentally friendlier Third World. Greenpeace, in its self-assurance, embodies a contemporary cultural imperialism as offensive as any Jesuit's.
That's exactly what many of the anti-pesticide mob want.
Banning DDT to control the population
Population control advocates blamed DDT for increasing third world population. In the 1960s, World Health Organization authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem but to assure that up to 40 percent of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the Agency for International Development stated, "Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing."
I've had a few of them admit to me privately that Africa and South America would be better off from an 'environmental' standpoint without any people at all.
You took me to task for being to harsh on a poster. Well, I'm glad I shut him up. It's about time these radical greenies started tasting a bit of their own medicine. These people don't give a rats ass about whos kids get sick and die as a result of their policies so why should I care one whit about their feelings?
It's perfectly ok with them if Mustafa Mbekis kids are shriveling away in some third world s*** hole from malaria as long as he or she thinks they are 'doing something' to protect eagles or something.
Well f*** them. People are dying out there SS. DDT could save millions of lives and billions of dollars if properly used. Envirowhackos have been calling people like me racists, bigots, and whatever they can think of for decades and I for one have had it. If they want to live with Anopholes I say lets move a few millions of them into their neighborhood for a while and then see what they say about it.
Lets let their kids 'whack a few bugs' for a while. Maybe they'll change their tune when their kids come down with a nice case of Break Bone Fever.
Regards,
L
L
You know, you're about the 4th poster to make this mistake.
I'm not wrong, because I haven't put forth any proposition... I've only asked questions.
In fact, that post of mine you were responding to already made this point.
See the little Sabertooth's all over this thread? They're all posts by me. Go look at them and tell me where I've taken a position one way or the other on the efficacy of banning DDT.
The racist part is in how earnestly the west can distance itself from its own traditions by seeing to it that American style freedom isn't offered to the third world. People will thrive under such freedom -- and that is the last thing these new paradigmers wish to see.
As I've pointed out elsewhere, the envirowackos have made no secret they think the planet should bear no more than one half billion people. As there are more than 500 million white people on the planet, and nobody who knows of the value of a wider gene pool is going to wipe out all the diversity anyway, you do the math. Musical chairs anyone?
Since you can see that more than a few whites have been targetted as well, it's not strictly racist. Through programs such as homosexual promotion in the schools, abortion and bastardization made chic, and euthanasia/utilitarianism on the rise, whites are volunteering wholesale to snuff it.
So, in short, the biggest difference that I can see is that the strategies to carry out the culling of the human herd are race based. While the western-based plantet-managing geniuses have convinced affluent but stupid whites, lemming-like, to volunteer to end their posterity, they have given non-whites little choice -- by letting them at each other and depriving them of protection from nature such as DDT (being one of many) would provide.
There's also some infatuation going on between these death cultivators and militant Islam. That goes a long way to help explain the Leftists' cheering for Al Qaeda, doesn't it?
I like this thread. It definitely adds something to the Death Cultivation bump list catalog.
The "rest of you?"
I'll try to go back & answer as time and the "usual insanity" of running a family allows- the bloody dog has had me out twice since 3:30 to hunt rats...
It's absurd!
Appreciate the testimony. All I know is that, given its widespread and somewhat indiscriminate use, it can't be that harmful to humans.
And the harm from disease-carrying insects is well-know and well documented. It seems like a simple risk/benefits calculation to me.
One concern: what does DDT do to pollinating insects such as bees? Is there such a thing as too much of it?
That's what gets me, too. It's like "child labor laws," which are very much an "issue" with people in comfortable, protected societies.
But if you are extremely poor, and have a lot of mouths to feed, every child needs to contribute something to the family's welfare, as soon as they can.
Not good for them, which is why proper pest management know-how is vital to farmers. Indiscriminate spraying of DDT or any other pesticide can do more harm than good on a farm, which is why most farmers spray at specific times of the year and use products that break down quickly. The problem with DDT in agriculture is that it lingers, the same characteristic that makes it ideal for use in homes to eradicate disease-carrying insects.
Sonoffagun! Do you reckon this stuff could be adapted to use on the Left?
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