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Men in blue coveralls and white surgical masks began their annual trek into the countryside here last week. Methodically, they sprayed one home after another with a chemical most Americans probably thought disappeared from use long ago: DDT. As villagers looked on, the workers doused inside and outside walls with a fine mist. It is a yearly effort to repel and kill mosquitoes that carry malaria - a disease that kills more than a million people a year, mostly children in sub-Saharan Africa. Advertisement This small kingdom near South Africa is one of a handful of countries still using the...

Each year, malaria afflicts a half-billion people (roughly the population of North America) and kills a million of them (roughly the population of San Jose). And the latter is a low-end estimate. The actual number of fatalities is hard to pin down, since a body initially weakened by malaria becomes predisposed to other maladies.[snip] The economist William Easterly calculates..."Preventing five million child deaths over the next ten years would cost just three dollars for each new mother," he writes in his book "The White Man's Burden." Mr. Easterly argues that the tragic incompetence of the Western foreign aid industry...stems from...

International experts are touting the widely banned pesticide as a best bet to save millions of human lives threatened by malaria. The disease, which kills mostly children and pregnant women, is largely spread by mosquitoes. The overwhelming majority—90 percent—of malaria victims live in Africa, where the disease plagues both human and economic health (Africa facts, maps, more). In May the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) endorsed the use of DDT for indoor antimalarial treatment in the developing world. The World Health Organization (WHO) is expected to do the same in short order, according to a comprehensive report published in...

Travellers to an exotic island in the Indian Ocean have been issued with warnings against a rare tropical disease. Seventy seven people have already died in Mauritius from the rare chikungunya virus which is carried by mosquitoes. Mauritius, an island paradise particularly popular with honeymooning couple has about 700,000 visitors annually, generating more than £400 million. Following the outbreak the number of French tourists who normally account for about a quarter of the total, plummeted.

Pennsylvania officials just announced success with their program to re-establish the state’s bald eagle population. But it’s a shame that such welcome news is being tainted by oft-repeated myths about the great bird’s near extinction. In its July 4 article reporting that the number of bald eagle pairs in Pennsylvania had increased from 3 in 1983 to 100 for the first time in over a century, the Associated Press reached into its file of bald eagle folklore and reported, “DDT poisoned the birds, killing some adults and making the eggs of those that survived thin. The thin eggs dramatically reduced...

See for example this thread first. I first saw this in Chemical & Engineering News, lo! these many years ago (maybe 1984 time frame?), and claim no credit except for remembering it. A mosquito was heard to complain, "I fear they have addled my brain!" "The cause of my sorrow is para-dicholoro- diphenyl-trichloroethane!"

UGANDA is set to start spraying homes countrywide with DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) against malaria in July, the Government has announced. In preparation for the DDT anti-malarial strategy, the US has given Uganda US$10m to fight malaria. The US President George Bush anti-malarial initiative has chosen three African countries; uganda, Tanzania and Angola, former health minister Jim Muhwezi said. Uganda loses over US$700m per year to malaria (more money than Uganda gets from donors to balance its budget), while between 100,000 and 120,000 people are killed by malaria annually, the Government says. Muhwezi said the spraying was being coordinated at continental level...

Her ideology has led to more deaths than Stalin's purges, and brought misery to hundreds of millions more. But now, over 40 years after her death, her grip on the fate of countless developing nations may finally be at an end. As the founder of the modern ecological movement, the American naturalist Rachel Carson is not an obvious candidate for the pantheon of evil. Her best-selling book Silent Spring, published in 1963, is widely credited with putting the interconnectedness of nature on the political agenda, and led to international bans on the use of the pesticide DDT, which she claimed...

Thursday , May 04, 2006 By Steven Milloy The U.S. Government has finally begun to reverse policy on the insecticide DDT. Let’s hope that this policy shift represents the beginning of the end of what can only be called a crime against humanity: the decades-old withholding of the world’s most effective anti-malarial weapon from billions of adults and children at risk of dying from the disease. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) told the Washington Times this week (May 3) that it endorses and will fund the indoor spraying of DDT in sub-Saharan Africa. Malaria kills more than one...

The yawn that greeted the announcement this week -- reported on by Joyce Howard Price -- that officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development are now vigorously endorsing and funding the use of DDT in Africa is representative of the world community's general lack of concern over the hundreds of millions of people who suffer from malaria every year. We applaud USAID's decision, even if we regret how long it's taken to reach it. Put bluntly, malaria's killing spree -- believed to be somewhere in the realm of 50 million people since 1972 -- is worse than AIDS. Of...

U.S. government officials are enthusiastically endorsing and funding the use of DDT in sub-Saharan Africa after years of resisting calls from scientists who said the insecticide would be the best weapon for fighting malaria, despite lingering objections by some environmentalists. "We're really pretty aggressive" about supporting DDT use against the mosquitoes that spread malaria, said Michael Miller, deputy assistant administrator of the Bureau of Global Health for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Added Richard Green, director of the Office of Health, Infectious Diseases and Nutrition in USAID's global health bureau: "We think DDT is an excellent insecticide and...

The bald eagle, the national bird which only a few decades ago appeared headed for extinction in the continental United States, is soaring once again.  A 40-year campaign to rescue the bald eagle from the deadly clutches of chemical poisoning has been, by all accounts, a remarkable success. The majestic bird had all but disappeared from the lower 48 states in the mid-1960s but is now flourishing -- so much so that the federal government is considering removing the bald eagle from its list of endangered species.Nowhere has that comeback been more dramatic than in New Jersey. The annual mid-winter...

Email this article Printer friendly page Siding with radical environmentalists and the United Nations, President Bush signed on to the UN Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (known as the POP Treaty) in 2001. This has been a global death warrant for millions of people at risk from malaria and other tropical diseases, since it, in effect, outlaws DDT and other pesticides that have proven to be safe and effective in eradicating or controlling the vectors that transmit these diseases. In Africa alone, over 1 million people die each year from malaria, while millions more suffer significant debilitation from the disease....

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 than 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." [Desowitz, RS. 1992. Malaria Capers, W.W. Norton & Company]

 They've been at it again. In Montreal, a bunch of politicians and activists just finished another round of negotiations among themselves about just how much of our freedom to take away in pursuit of a greener planet. That's "green," as in "envious" -- of the people who were able to invent, build industries and develop economies in generations past, before the environmentalists convinced world "leaders" that products that improve human life, and the factories that make those products, must be limited in the name of the Earth.Meanwhile, in Ntinda, Uganda, that country's vice president was calling on world leaders to...

A shipment of hairy crabs imported from China, some of which have already been sold and eaten, was found to contain residues of the pesticide DDT, the Department of Health said on Wednesday. This was discovered during a random DOH inspection of aquatic products sold in markets throughout the island. The department began the inspections in September in an effort to determine whether residues of drugs or pesticides were retained in such products, and also to assess the level of metals they might contain. According to the DOH, the hairy crabs sold in three supermarkets -- Carrefour, Hsi-Mei and Hsing-Loong,...

Rachel Carson, a driving force behind the modern environmental movement, grew up in a modest homestead in Springdale Borough near the Allegheny River. For the budding marine biologist, the river's waters were an early inspiration. Now, more than four decades after Ms. Carson's death, her presence may return to those waters. Allegheny County Council tomorrow will consider renaming the Ninth Street Bridge in her honor. If the resolution is approved, Ms. Carson would join Roberto Clemente and Andy Warhol as namesakes for the three Downtown "Sister Bridges" that cross the Allegheny. "This is long overdue," said Esther L. Barazzone, president...

LONG BEACH - A male fish off the Southern California coast is getting in touch with its feminine side. And that has some scientists worried. Kevin Kelley, a professor of environmental endocrinology at Cal State Long Beach, is part of a team studying a species of male flatfish in Southern California waters that has been found to have high levels of estrogen, which appear to be causing feminization. Kelley and other researchers believe that the treated wastewater draining through underground pipes into waters off Santa Monica, Huntington Beach and the Palos Verdes Peninsula contains human estrogen hormones expelled in human...

They're the scourge of hobo encampments and hot-sheet motels. To impressionable children everywhere, they're a snippet of nursery rhyme, an abstract foe lurking beneath the covers that emerges when mommy shuts the door at night. But bedbugs on Park Avenue? Ask the horrified matron who recently found her duplex teeming with the blood-sucking beasts. Or the tenants of a co-op on Riverside Drive who spent $200,000 earlier this month to purge their building of the pesky little thugs. The Helmsley Park Lane was sued two years ago by a welt-covered guest who blamed the hotel for harboring the critters. The...

An extensive study of malaria-carrying mosquito or "vector" populations in different ecological zones of Cameroon has documented widespread and varied resistance to insecticides, part of an alarming trend across Africa that might ultimately jeopardize efforts to control malaria with treated bed nets and indoor spraying. The study, which will be presented at a special session on insecticide resistance at the Fourth Multilateral Initiative on Malaria (MIM) Pan-African Malaria Conference, is illustrative of a growing body of research in Africa that is finding increasing mosquito resistance to pyrethroid insecticides, which are used for insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs), and DDT, which has...