Free Republic

Nobody in his hut, including his seven children, sleeps under a net at night. Instead, Mr. Ndefi has taken his family’s supply of anti-malaria nets and sewn them together into a gigantic sieve that he uses to drag the bottom of the swamp ponds, sweeping up all sorts of life: baby catfish, banded tilapia, tiny mouthbrooders, orange fish eggs, water bugs and the occasional green frog. “I know it’s not right,” Mr. Ndefi said, “but without these nets, we wouldn’t eat.” Across Africa, from the mud flats of Nigeria to the coral reefs off Mozambique, mosquito-net fishing is a growing...

How often do whales clean their ears? Well, never. And so, year after year, their ear wax builds up, layer upon layer. According to a study published Monday, these columns of ear wax contain a record of chemical pollution in the oceans. The study used the ear wax extracted from the carcass of a blue whale that washed ashore on a California beach back in 2007. Scientists at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History collected the wax from inside the skull of the dead whale and preserved it. The column of wax was almost a foot long. "It's kind...

The Endangered Species Act has become a gold mine for liberal activists and a barrier to our nation’s infrastructure. It is time for it to go. The Heartland Institute's Taylor Smith reports for the January issue of Townhall Magazine.

... Former Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-Texas) thinks the threat of the Ebola virus very well may be a government plan to "deceive" the public. "I do know that governments deceive us and sometimes they hype things. I don't think we are going to see in the next year a horrendous breakout of Ebola in this country," Paul said in a recent video on the topic, according to a press release sent out Thursday morning by his "Voices of Liberty" project. Paul, "a former physician," offered the chemical DDT as a "viable alternative for treatment," as the release...

More cases of chikungunya, a painful virus spread by mosquitos, are being reported across the country. The Centers for Disease Control has listed a total of 497 cases in the U.S. in 35 states, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, 197 locally transmitted. Examiner.com reports that other state and local health agencies noted 40 cases, bringing the total to 537. The outbreak is due to a recent epidemic that started late last year in the Caribbean. The first two locally transmitted stateside cases were reported in Florida late last week. "The arrival of chikungunya virus, first in the tropical Americas...

HERE IN MARYLAND, it is impossible to travel too far in any direction without seeing something that celebrates the legacy of author and environmentalist Rachel Carson. There is a greenway trail and a conservation park named for her here, an alma mater university and a Rachel Carson grade school there — and, of course, the Silver Spring home where she would write “Silent Spring,” the hot-button ’60s work that is often cited as the spark that ignited the modern environmental movement.

Decades after industrial waste dumping turned part of Southern California's seafloor into a toxic hot spot, scientists have dredged up a mystery. Chemicals fouling the ocean off the Palos Verdes Peninsula seem to be going away without being cleaned up. Samples taken from the sediment suggest more than 100 metric tons of the banned pesticide DDT and industrial compounds known as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, have vanished from one of the country's most hazardous sites, almost a 90% drop in just five years.

California Dr. D. Rutledge Taylor treks around the world in 40 days to uncover the tragic consequences of banning DDT. His documentary "3 Billion and Counting" is reviewed by Rebecca Terrell Documentary Exposes the Horrific Human Cost of the DDT Ban The New American 06 June 2013 3 Billion and Counting, Produced/written/directed by D. Rutledge Taylor, Los Angeles, California: Frogbite Productions, 102 minutes (produced in 2010). Most people will complain indignantly of government corruption and foreign atrocities and end by shaking their heads in discouragement. Not so with D. Rutledge Taylor. Known to his patients as “Dr. Rutledge,” this...

A 1972 insecticide ban on DDT literally causes the deaths of about a million people per year, though an extensive investigation by the U.S. EPA found that DDT is safe. DDT Ban Breeds Death The New American 06 June 2013 Worldwide more than 2,700 people will die today because of a bureaucratic regulation instituted during the Nixon administration in 1972. The same number died yesterday and will again tomorrow, in an ever-growing tally of victims of that catastrophic policy. The regulation imposed by Nixon’s newly formed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned DDT, an insecticide that had until then saved...

Bedbugs are on the rise again in the U.S., which means business is booming for pest control companies like Orkin. With increased travel, both internationally and domestically, and higher bedbug resistance to existing pesticides, Orkin has seen an almost 33 percent boost in bedbug business compared to 2011. The company has just released its rankings of U.S. cities in order of the number of bedbug treatments from January to December 2012. The “Windy City” of Chicago tops the list, followed by Detroit, Los Angeles, Denver and Cincinnati.

A bedbug infestation at a Northwest Washington fire station left firefighters sleeping in their personal vehicles or in the firetrucks to avoid being bitten by the bugs in their bunkrooms, a report on the conditions at D.C. firehouses found. The 180-page report by the Office of the Inspector General details a wide swath of problematic conditions at D.C. fire stations across the city, including a lack of working smoke detectors, leaking roofs, flooded basements, rodent infestations and inoperable heating or cooling systems. Among the findings, 19 stations had significant rodent problems with one reporting that dead mice had been found...

DALLAS - Bedbugs live on the blood of mammals. They eat while you sleep. And they're dining on more North Texas apartment dwellers every year. "Sometimes I can't even get to bed at night," said Skyler Wells of the Park Timbers Apartments in Lewisville, who's had bedbugs in his apartment twice in the last four months. "I'm thinking they're crawling on me. I'm scratching myself. I'm taking three showers a night, because I'm thinking I'm gonna wash 'em all off me." Chris McGinn of City of Lewisville Code Compliance Department said bedbugs weren't even on the city's radar three years...

Liberals have advanced their worldview through countless acts of subversion through science. The DDT ban. The nuclear freeze movement. Global Warming. We have witnesses the abuse of science for well over a century. And that abuse has always extended to the human mind. Psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology have all been attempts to understand the human thought process, and frequently to alter it. Consider the rise of modern propaganda ...

Malaria-carrying mosquitoes are disappearing in some parts of Africa, but scientists are unsure as to why. Figures indicate controls such as anti-mosquito bed nets are having a significant impact on the incidence of malaria in some sub-Saharan countries. But in Malaria Journal, researchers say mosquitoes are also disappearing from areas with few controls. They are uncertain if mosquitoes are being eradicated or whether they will return with renewed vigour. Data from countries such as Tanzania, Eritrea, Rwanda, Kenya and Zambia all indicate that the incidence of malaria is dropping fast. Researchers believe this is due to effective implementation of control...

Researchers identify 26 past scares analogous to the global warming alarm.Polls show that roughly one person in two is concerned about manmade global warming. Why? Because vivid, alarming forecasts, even those based on weak foundations, are persuasive. For a while at least.We’ve seen this many times before. Take the alarm over mercury in fish: in 2004, an Environmental Protection Agency employee warned that 630,000 babies per year were born at risk of brain and nervous system damage due to “unsafe” levels of mercury in their mothers’ blood. Expectant mothers were discouraged from eating fish.Japan consumes a lot of fish, and...

Just as students head back to college and families finish summer vacations comes the latest bad news from pest control companies: Bedbug infestations are getting worse and becoming more common in some places, including dorms, hotels, nursing homes, hospitals, office buildings, and schools and day-care centers. According to a survey released Wednesday by the National Pest Management Association and the University of Kentucky, pest control companies say there has been double-digit growth in infestations in the past year. About 54 percent of pest companies reported treating bedbugs in college dorms, compared with 35 percent in 2010; 80 percent reported treating...

Albuquerque police responded to a report of dead body in apartment and found the man’s body surrounded by bedbugs. The insect infestation was just the beginning of the problems for the apartment complex. The city warns potential renters to look closely before leasing an apartment at Uptown Park. “We would not recommend living in any of those three units,” city spokesman Chris Ramirez said... “When they got there, they realized once they went into the apartment, that the apartment was completely infested with bedbugs,” ... Neighbors were itching to find out what happened.

Should Bill Gates be prosecuted?Bill Gates released a swarm of potentially deadly mosquitoes at a technology conference and yelled, 'There's no reason only poor people should get malaria'. What an idiot. While it is unlikely these mosquitoes were malaria carriers, there are a host of other potentially fatal diseases that mosquitoes carry. Among these diseases are various forms of encephalitis and West Nile virus that are common among North American Mosquitoes. My granddaughter got La Crosse encephalitis from mosquitoes a few years ago. She spent several very scary days in pediatric intensive care. Anyone who would deliberately release these potentially...

Malaria mosquitoes utilize CO2 from exhaled air to localize humans from afar. In the vicinity of their preferred host, they alter their course towards the human feet. Researcher Remco Suer discovered how female malaria mosquitoes use foot odors in the last meters to guide them to their favoured biting place. Suer, who is defending his doctoral thesis May 9 at Wageningen University, part of Wageningen UR, sees possibilities to disrupt the host seeking behaviour of the malaria mosquito. African malaria mosquitoes, Anopheles gambiae, use their olfactory organs, two antennae, two mouthparts (maxillary palps) and the proboscis, to search for their...

Experts are predicting an bedbug explosion this summer so is it time to sneer in the face of the enviro-Nazis; invoke the spirt of Walter Steuber and follow the Delaware County tradition of homebrewing our own dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane? Steuber was a chemist who in the final days of World War II made DDT in the basement of his Swarthmore home. The desirable insecticide has been exclusively for military use and when it popped up for sale at two hardware stores in Media and Swarthmore the authorities investigated. When it was found that Steuber was not using priority chemicals, the government allowed...