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Karma Forget the billions spent on China’s massive military build-up, the ongoing attempt to make the Chinese Communist Party the most powerful and feared force on the planet. The yellow peril is being decimated by tiny foes, one of them microscopic. All the chest-thumping and saber-rattling, and it finally comes down to a stand-off with a lowly bug that happens to hate communists. Boy, they didn’t see that coming! African Swine Fever (ASF) With a mortality rate near 100%, ASF has swept through China’s hog industry, decimating their primary source of protein. Best estimates put losses at 30-35% of China’s...

In continuing to explore the crystal structure of insecticides, the research team began studying fluorinated forms of DDT, swapping out chlorine atoms for fluorine. They prepared two solid forms of the compound—a monofluoro and a difluoro analog—and tested them on fruit flies and mosquitoes, including mosquito species that carry malaria, yellow fever, Dengue, and Zika. The solid forms of fluorinated DDT killed insects more quickly than did DDT; the difluoro analog, known as DFDT, killed mosquitoes two to four times faster. The researchers also made a detailed analysis of the relative activities of the solid-state forms of fluorinated DDT, noting...

FULL TITLE: BUGGED OUT Deadly ‘super mosquitoes that are even tougher’ accidentally created by scientists after bungled experiment ============================================================ GENETICALLY modified mosquitoes that were designed by scientists to help populations decrease are actually thriving. This is according to new research that claims the plan to create gene-hacked mosquitoes that have offspring which die immediately has spectacularly backfired and now scientists don't know what will happen next. he modified mosquitoes were released in Jacobina in Brazil and were supposed to mix with the local population and decrease numbers with their weak offspring genetics. Although the wild population did plummet for a...

A Massachusetts woman passed away this weekend after contracting eastern equine encephalitis, a rare mosquito-borne disease that can target the central nervous system. After her death, the woman’s daughter shared a touching tribute to the woman who taught her how to live life to the fullest. Laurie Sylvia started noticing symptoms just six days before her death at the age of 59. According to WCVB-TV, the cause of Sylvia’s death was, in fact, EEE, though the illness is incredibly rare in the United States. The virus, transmitted through mosquitos, causes brain infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The...

On Jan. 24, 2017, PBS aired a two-hour special on Rachel Carson, the mother of the environmental movement. Although the program crossed the line from biography to hagiography, in Carson’s case, the unbridled praise was well deserved – with one exception. Rachel Carson was an American hero. In the early 1960s, she was the first to warn that a pesticide called DDT could accumulate in the environment, the first to show that it could harm fish, birds, and other wildlife, the first to warn that its overuse would render it ineffective, and the first to predict that more natural means...

(snip) -- So-called “conservative” commentator Bill Kristol reportedly has his never-ending campaign to take down President Donald Trump receive funding from a left-wing billionaire. Kristol, the editor-at-large of The Weekly Standard, seems to have taken his never-Trump activities to another level, actively opposing Republican candidates and conservative causes through the group he founded, “Republicans for the Rule of Law.” But despite its name, the group seems to have no Republican donors according to a report by Julie Kelly of American Greatness, though there is one prominent benefactor: progressive billionaire Pierre Omidyar, the co-founder of eBay. One of Omidyar’s nonprofits, the...

We've been told conservatives don't believe in science and that there's a "Republican war on science." But John Tierney, who's written about science for The New York Times for 25 years and now writes for the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, told me in my latest online video, "The real war on science is the one from the left." Really? Conservatives are more likely to be creationists -- denying evolution. "Right," says Tierney. "But creationism doesn't affect the way science is done." What about President George W. Bush banning government funding of stem cell research? "He didn't stop stem cell research,"...

A deadly mosquito-borne pandemic poses a greater threat to humankind than global war, billionaire Bill Gates warns. In a hard-hitting new documentary, the world's richest man said a killer bug could wipe out 10 million people without warning. Footage seen by MailOnline, set to be aired next week, shows the philanthropist's worries towards the danger of disease-carrying mosquitos. An outbreak could mimic the damage of the Ebola epidemic in late 2014 or the burden of that of the deadly SARS outbreak in 2003, experts worry. Climate change warming the planet is allowing for mosquitos to spread from their usual habitats,...

Upcoming Discovery Impact film MOSQUITO is a timely in depth look at this very tiny, very dangerous creature, and how it is changing in unpredictable and unprecedented ways. The film chronicles the increasing global threat this tiny animal poses while emphatically raising the points that without an international coordinated effort, the world and its citizens are at risk for a historic pandemic that could put billions at risk of a fatal infection. The global crisis is highlighted in the worldwide premiere, Thursday July 6 at 9P, on Discovery Channel and Discovery networks around the world. Mosquitoes kill more than 1...

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...

The spread of Zika is the price being paid for a massive policy failure on mosquito control, says World Health Organization leader Margaret Chan. Speaking at the agency's annual World Health Assembly, Dr Chan said experts had "dropped the ball" in the 1970s with regards to getting a handle on disease-carrying insects. More than 60 countries and territories now have continuing Zika transmission. Most recently, the infection, spread by mosquito bites, reached Africa. ... Eradication campaigns were successful in the Americas with 18 countries getting rid of the insect by 1962. But insecticide resistance plus a lack of political will...

This Aedes Aegypti mosquito photographed on human skin in a lab of the International Training and Medical Research Training Center (CIDEIM) on Jan. 25 in Cali, Colombia. (Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images) By Nick Miroff April 29 at 10:37 AM For the first time in the Western Hemisphere, researchers have detected the Zika virus in Aedes albopictus, the mosquito species known as the “Asian tiger,” a finding that increases the number of U.S. states potentially at risk for transmission of the disease. During the summer months when U.S. mosquito populations are at their peak, albopictus are more ubiquitous than the Aedes aegypti...

The World Health Organization (WHO) has sparked a global scare over a tropical virus outbreak that officials say is worse than last year's Ebola epidemic, which killed 11,000 people in Africa. They predict the Zika virus could infect as many as four million people by the end of 2016. "Last year, the virus was detected in the Americas, where it is now spreading explosively," warned WHO Director-General Margaret Chan in January. She told her executive board in Geneva that the "level of alarm is extremely high," and on February 1 declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.For...

The Zika virus ravaging South America causes horrific problems including birth defects and creeping paralysis. And now it has made its way to 16 US states. There is no vaccine. With the Zika virus declared an international public health emergency a few weeks ago by the World Health Organization, it seems a good time to remind people of another mosquito borne disease with even more horrible effects--malaria. [...] You see, malaria was eliminated in the West and North because of the invention, and use, of the miracle pesticide DDT. DDT could stop Zika, just as it stopped malaria. For that...

The executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) asserts that a lifting of the ban on DDT could prevent the spread of the Zika virus, just as it could have wiped out malaria. Dr. Jane Orient tells Breitbart News the major public health measure required to combat the Zika virus pandemic is mosquito control and says, "DDT was the most effective public health weapon of all time." Orient continues: The ban on DDT was basically the decision of one man, William Ruckelshaus, going against a mountain of evidence on safety and enormous health benefits. It was...

Dedication: A Lie Dedication. In the front of the book, Carson dedicates Silent Spring as follows: “To Albert Schweitzer who said ‘Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the Earth.’” This appears to indicate that the great man opposed the use of insecticides. However, in his autobiography Schweitzer writes, on page 262: “How much labor and waste of time these wicked insects do cause us ... but a ray of hope, in the use of DDT, is now held out to us.” Upon reading his book, it is clear that Schweitzer was...

A state of emergency has been declared in four Florida counties -- Miami-Dade, Hillsborough, Lee, and Santa Rosa -- after nine people were diagnosed with the Zika virus. While the nine people are believed to have contracted the virus while out of the country, Florida's governor, Rick Scott, said he wants the state to be on high alert. "Although Florida's current nine Zika cases were travel-related, we have to ensure Florida is prepared and stays ahead of the spread of the Zika virus in our state," Scott said in a statement on Thursday. "Our Department of Health will continue to...

These People Took DDT Pills In the 1970s to Prove it Was Safe In 1971 two people in North Hollywood started eating DDT pills every day. That's right, they willingly swallowed 10mg of poison every single day for three months. In front of witnesses. From the Associated Press: - Robert Loibl and his wife, Louise, hold 10-milligram capsules of DDT which they took in front of witnesses for 93 days at lunch time, June 10, 1971. Loibl said their total dosage was more than the average person consumes in 83 years. He said his wife's dandruff disappeared, their appetites perked...

Big Sur >> She might be a princess, but she’s about to do some heavy lifting. California condor No. 799, dubbed Princess, is expected any day now to make her first flight from her nest atop a redwood tree in the Big Sur wilderness, said Kelly Sorenson, executive director of the Ventana Wildlife Society. “There’s been five chicks raised in wild nests just this year,” Sorenson said. “That’s quite an accomplishment.” One of this year’s chicks was raised by two female condors after the suspected mate of one of them died after nesting began. Ventana Wildlife Society monitored females 317...

The terms racism, white supremacy, and crimes against humanity are bandied about so often that they have become almost meaningless. But they are absolutely appropriate in an arena where they are too rarely applied: radical environmentalism’s campaigns that perpetuate poverty, disease and death, by denying Earth’s most impoverished and powerless people access to modern life-saving technologies. Imagine activist groups preventing you from having your child vaccinated against polio or hepatitis, or from starting her on chemotherapy for leukemia – because they are “concerned” about “possible side-effects” and the “ethics” of permitting such “risky” procedures. Absurd! you say. Outrageous! Of course...