Re: Environmentalist Genocide: How the Ban on DDT Caused 50 Million Malaria Deaths Wo
So did third world countries stop using DDT based on a false premise or not?
It seems funny that when faced with the very real increase in malaria in the third world after the end of DDT use that really was based on faulty statistics the best you can come up with is "B-but-but the government didn't do it!"
In the real world, international environmentalist groups like Environmental Defense have been pushing third world countries to ban DDT, sold using the erroneous statistics in the book Silent Spring that DDT gave children cancer.
That there was never a formal international ban on DDT is immaterial, the fact is that DDT use was ended due to bad statistics and people, mostly children, died because of it.
The international ban benchmark is pretty silly anyway given the inability of the international community to limit CO2 when all the idiots at the UN are true believers in CAGW dogma.
You haven't given any kind of evidence for your views and it's a little hard to know exactly what you're trying to claim here. So a little clarification, if you don't mind.
1) Do you acknowledge the generally-accepted environmental consequences from DDT's persistence up the food chain?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Environmental_impact
2) Do you acknowledge that indiscriminate use of DDT in agriculture unnecessarily increases resistance amongst malarial mosquito populations?
https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/ddt-brief-history-and-status
3) Do you therefore agree that bans for uses
not related to malaria control were and are generally a good idea?
4) Do you recognise that the OP was incorrect and her sources deliberately dishonest in the failure to acknowledge those exemptions (and the attempt to convey the opposite message) in international and most national bans?
As for "the very real increase in malaria in the third world after the end of DDT use," that's a misleading claim at best. Malaria mortality rates have declined and remained low in all regions except sub-Saharan Africa, and even the OP acknowledges that eradication efforts in Africa have been hampered by a number of complicating factors.
FIG. 3.
Malaria mortality in the 20th century. The graph shows the number of malaria deaths per 10,000 population per year in Europe and North America (⧫—⧫); the Caribbean and Central and South America (▪——▪); sub-Saharan Africa (•——•); China and Northeast Asia (X—X); the Middle East, South Asia, and the Western Pacific (▴——▴); and worldwide (⧫—⧫) (see Appendix and Table 3).
Evolutionary and Historical Aspects of the Burden of Malaria
By contrast, attempts by similar means to control malaria in sub-Saharan Africa had little success, except in its southern and most marginal zones of transmission.
Indeed, the malaria problems of Africa were, and are, of an altogether different type from those confronted anywhere else, both in human terms and in the biological factors that underlie African malaria transmission. Above all, the stability and intensity of malaria transmission in Africa presented two huge, actual or potential, problems. When global campaigns for malaria control were being planned at the World Health Organization in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were many who doubted that even a tool as powerful as DDT could have a significant impact on African malaria because of the intensity of its transmission (48, 58). Moreover, and by the same token, it was questioned whether it was even safe to try to reduce malaria transmission intensities in tropical Africa because of the eventual loss of immunity in the older population (48, 58, 202, 203) and the consequent risk of epidemic malaria should control measures fail.
National malaria control organizations were nevertheless operational in many African countries by the 1950s. It must soon have become clear, however, that whatever may have been being achieved elsewhere by reducing malaria transmission using DDT, rather little effect was served by this approach in sub-Saharan Africa, except in certain limited circumstances and mainly in its southernmost parts.
We've already seen in this thread that there was indeed at least one example (Sri Lanka) in which a complete ban on DDT was put in place; and soon lifted when malaria rates rose; and not long afterwards the effectiveness of DDT was found to be stymied by mosquitoes' resistance. Obviously, examples such as that don't excuse the dishonest propaganda of the sources used by the OP. And even in that case, no-one has provided any evidence that Rachel Carson or any environmentalist groups are causally responsible for that complete ban.
Again, there's this little thing called 'evidence' that some folk would prefer to see before convicting others to burn in hell for eternity.
