The cost of banning DDT...

Wonder if it isn't another kind of dengue, which is often called 'bone break fever.

Unfortunately, any post by Gungasnake tends to be ignored or reflexively mocked.

The same can, perhaps, be said about any of my posts.

The reality is that he is often spot on with his posts as he is with this one.

Thanks to a very talented, but flawed, author (Rachel Carsons) and a burgeoning eco-lib movement, DDT was branded the Devil's Bile.

As a result, multiple millions have died since the publishing The Silent Spring.

Fortunately for Carsonites and Western Eco-Warriors, those millions tend to be Africans.

Now we have a study that tells us the damned skeeters can kill a whole lot of us in the US.

When I was a kid, every summer my town came through the streets spewing DDT into the air. We were warned to stay inside, but the fumes smelled so sweet.

Now I'm 55 and I have never suffered from a skeeter borne disease. I also have no problem with the thickness of my egg shells and if every bird of prey died to save the lives of my children, I would be extremely saddened but ultimately A-OK.

If I come down with some heinous long term exposure disease in the cancer family, it will be far more likely that it is due to a hundred other foreign substances I have (willingly or otherwise) ingested than the DDT sprayed on my neighborhood street.

How many Eco-Warriors praise and defend the mosquito when their child dies of skeeter borne diseases?

well, what have we here!! Two more fruitcakes who have the temerity to suggest that humans should come before other critters when it comes to deciding life and death.

The lynch mob will be by shortly to collect you boys....we can have your kind running around thinking that you are free to believe such blasphemy.

How dare we argue for the advancement of our species!

As we all know, if mosquitoes had self-awareness, they would, as a species, commit mass suicide rather than killing a single African child.

Natural ecology is only important to the extent that human science cannot supplant it.

Personally, I will mourn the passing of the Elk, the Rhino, the Elephant, the Gorilla, the Red Panda, the Orangutan, the Okapi, the Komodo Dragon, et al, but given the choice between their extinction and the extinction of the human species, there is no choice.

Many more species than exist today have met extinction in the past.

Extinction is inevitable and necessary.

Because extinction is caused by humans it is no less natural than extinction caused by weather conditions, disease, comets, or predators.

Admittedly, I would prefer humanity to play the most minor of roles in the extinction of a species, but this is a super-natural consideration. It is not natural for one species to worry about the longevity of another.

The mere fact that we do places us in both a natural and super-natural position that demands survival.

We do these things because we can.

What we do does not always accommodate our biological neighbors, but it most often does accommodate our prolonged survival.

Were we given the gift of self-awareness or was it an evolutionary trait based on species survival?

Who really cares?

Either way, there is no shame in advancing our species towards eternity.

Deer, bears, beetles, snakes, hippos et al cannot ever hope to do so, and we embrace (sentimental) stasis when we attempt to exert our far superior ecological influence to save all species.

New Jersey! Uh oh, that's getting pretty close to home. Where's my DDT?

That's about the size of it. These green whackos are fine with banning DDT as long as the people dying from it are just a bunch of Africans who don't speak English. But that picture might be about to change...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ai0j6rXpQso

Telling, I think, that none of these "green whackos," or their sympathizers have bothered to defend the banning of DDT.

Must be because they cannot.

more likely is that they don't think that they need to. They are so sure that they are right that they can't be bothered to make their case or defend their opinions. Obviously, this is dangerous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2eW18CHYIQ&feature=related

Why so smug? You've done nothing more than repeat a couple anti-environmentalist bullet points, toss in a couple of ad hominems about environmentalists and make nonsensical claims about the case for DDT that come right out of pop culture, not science. You haven't made much of an argument for DDT, so it's something that even a casual observer such as myself, who doesn't care much about the environment, can easily refute. I don't care much one way or another about DDT, and actually support its use in limited scenarios for vector management but so do environmentalists, and your claims that millions die due to this "ban" are simplistic and wrong headed. They show a superficial knowledge of how both DDT and malaria eradication work as well as the alternative solutions available.



99% of statistics are made up on the spot. I've investigated several such claims about the many deaths attributable to this book and found each quite seriously lacking. And before you do your "eco-warrior" ad hominem bit note that I'm really not much of an environmentalist and that isn't going to work, I've just never been very green myself but did a fair amount of toxicology research when trying to figure out how to combat mosquitoes without harming my dog, cat and fish. Most of them that I've run across were just knee-jerk anti-environmentalism without much in way to substantiate them. The few that weren't failed to make a compelling case that restrictions on DDT use is responsible for the deaths ultimately attributed to it.

So instead of resorting to the knee-jerk anti-environmentalism and the false dilemma you constructed of man versus animal let's actually break down the argument and skip the rhetoric. Let's start with the claims made about The Silent Spring itself, as they seem to be largely fueled by superficial knowledge.

First of all, Rachel Carson did not argue for a ban on DDT in The Silent Spring, and explicitly addressed the use of it as vector control:



The indiscriminate use of DDT contributed toward pesticide resistance in mosquitoes and it was toxic to more than just the pests it was targeting. The advice in the book is against the indiscriminate use of DDT that was the previous norm. And despite the criticism of Carson on the right you really won't find many sane people advocating a return to those levels of DDT use at all.



I think this is a false choice. There is a wealth of alternatives to indiscriminate use of DDT. There have been countries (namely Vietnam) that switched from DDT regimes to non DDT regimes and found much greater success in fighting malaria. And lost amid all this mindless environmentalist bashing is that DDT use for fighting malaria is NOT banned, and that in the Stockholm Convention use to fight disease vectors is exempted from DDT restrictions and that it was done with the blessing of the environmental groups that oppose indiscriminate DDT use. The environmentalists you blindly criticize recognize better than do you the specific advantages of DDT use in fighting malaria. Namely its time-buying during an epidemic by breaking the transmission cycle, DDT is a great quick fix but it's not a great long term solution due to the resistance mosquitoes build against it.




The bottom line is that you guys who attribute all these deaths to the DDT ban ignore that even with indiscriminate DDT logistics and DDT resistance just don't make this a simple magic bullet against malaria. In a large contiguous place like Africa it would require a sychronized campaign whose logistics just might not be feasable. For this reason the experts recommend Integrated Vector Management, which is a combination of solutions that can involve indoor residual spraying with pesticides that can, but don't need to, include DDT.


Malaria has been successfully fought without DDT (for example, its use in the US began when the eradication of malaria was nearly complete anyway), blaming Carson for malaria deaths is tantamount to blaming her for the antipathy towards malaria, which is the primary reason resources have not been brought to bear to fight mosquitos, not because of DDT restrictions. Eradicating malaria isn't going to be done with a simple solution. It requires a concerted effort that pervasively changes lifestyles. Entomologist Andrew Spielman said that if he had one item to provide to villages with malaria epidemics it would be a cement mixer, in order to make drainage canals.





Thank you doctor Finn, but carcinogenicity isn't at all the only health concern with DDT. That you aren't concerned with its effect on your own health is just not much in way of evidence that DDT is harmless to humans.


So other than Carson being a convenient lightning rod for folks who don't like environmentalism (I get this sentiment, it's often fueled by an appeal to emotions instead of hard science) what exactly is this love affair with DDT? Is it the notion that it is the most cost-effective solution? That is of dubious veracity[1] . Is it because you see no viable alternatives? If so, pyrethroids have not been shown to develop pesticide resistance in mosquitoes as far as I am aware, and also have not been shown to be as toxic to other non-pests in the environment as DDT (it is still toxic for fish, however).

What is this motivated by other than ignorance and politics? What do you have against the current consensus among scientists on vector management and DDT? Do you even know what it is? It doesn't seem so, because it allows for use of DDT, but acknowledges that vector management can't be fought by DDT alone and that DDT use carries downsides. You seem to only have the TV version of this science in a couple of anti-environmentalist soundbites. Where is your science?


[1] Comparison of the cost and cost-effectiveness of insecticide-treated bednets and residual house-spraying in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa - C. A. Goodman , A. E. P. Mnzava , S. S. Dlamini , B. L. Sharp , D. J. Mthembu & J. K. Gumede

The jury on this one is in. You can blather all you want, the hard cold facts are these:

DDT was and remains a legitimate candidate for greatest thing the white man ever invented, and had all but wiped polio and malaria off the planet by the mid 1950s.

DDT was banned in the US and throughout most of the world as a consequence of Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring.

Since then, nearly a hundred million people have died unnecessarily from malaria.

In the intervening decades, nothing has arisen to take the place of DDT; if it had, nobody would be starting to use DDT again particularly in Africa.

Taking the place of DDT would have to entail a cost effectiveness factor comparable to that of DDT. Nothing else comes close.

There was a racism factor involved in the efforts to ban DDT world wide; the thinking at the time was that too many African blacks were surviving to adulthood and this was going to produce a Malthus/Paul Ehrlich type catastrophe.

That situation has now been reversed with black Africans having access to DDT and Americans lacking it, with new diseases on the horizen with the potential to devastate North America. Most people refer to that sort of thing as "Karma".

Right now, there are black Africans talking amongst themselves, and one of them is saying:

Not true. This is simply not a "cold hard fact".



Again, not true. The notion that these people would have been saved by DDT ignores the logistics of saving them with DDT.



Again not true. Integrated vector management works better than indiscriminate DDT use.



Again not true. I cited a study that explicitly compares the cost of DDT to other methods and found DDT to be more expensive.

If anything is "blather" this mindless citing of false "facts" is.

Aside from everything else, the whole world now knows and understands the mindset of the envirowhacks:

http://www.foxnews.com/search-results/m/26461687/the-valley-hope-forgot.htm

Reducing the population of Africa by banning DDT is only marginally different from what they're doing in the San Juaquin valley.

http://www.junkscience.com/ddtfaq.html



Over 100 points made...