DDT and Environmentalism |
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Andalus
Moderator Group Joined: 12 October 2005 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 1187 |
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Posted: 21 December 2008 at 10:23pm |
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Why The Insecticide DDT Should Never Have Been Banned
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1. | When Sri Lanka banned DDT in the mid 1960s, malaria cases rose from 29 in 1964 to more than half a million five years later. |
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2. | Ecuador, which expanded its use of DDT in the 1980s and 1990s, experienced a 60 per cent drop in infection rates. |
Let us discount for bureaucrats with blithely Herodian intentions. How close to deliberate their grotesque implementation of zero population growth was will probably remain a mystery. What about the decent activists, let alone the self-respecting scientists with access to all the learned journals? How could slogans about saving the planet have engendered such a schizophrenic attitude towards the evidence? At what point did the realisation begin to dawn that the dominant paradigm was a big lie? Why is Greenpeace still active in India?
Lapkin sees these questions through the prism of a new form of First World vanity. "The anti-DDT crusade is made all the more outrageous by the distinct taint of neo-colonialism that is its indelible accompaniment. In a way, the push to ban this insecticide represents the ultimate in modern Eurocentric arrogance, the newest form of imperialism." He likens it to the "we know what's best" Kipling version of taking up the white man's burden imposing a green, insecticide-free colonial ideology of primal, untainted nature. Given the Herodian consequences, it seems to me that the more fitting analogy is with the Belgian than the British empire, and with Joseph Conrad's Mister Kurtz. Still there can be no doubting his conclusion that
"hubris, folly and ethnocentrism...spawned this unnecessary tragedy".
To that list must surely be added the Left's habitual response of taking for ever to recognise � and never admitting � when it gets things massively wrong. How massively? Crichton puts the price of environmentalist action at "somewhere between 10 and 30 million people since the 1970s". For those who dislike figures so rubbery, it should be noted that Third World population statistics pose all sorts of problems and that the interaction of malaria with other diseases and factors, such as poverty and malnutrition, complicates matters. Even the lowest estimate is a stupefying toll and one that reinforces the parallels with other monstrous, secular religions of the past century.
For Crichton, the most imperative of contemporary challenges is to retrieve responsible environmentalism from the clutches of those zealots for whom it has become a substitute faith and return to scientific discipline.
"I am thoroughly sick of politicised so-called facts that simply aren't true. It isn't that these 'facts' are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organisations are spinning their case... in the strongest way. Not at all � what more and more groups are doing is putting out lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false. This trend began with the DDT campaign and persists to this day."
Discovering the extent to which these strictures apply to the Australian Greens as a political party, and their allies, seems to me one of the most important challenges of contemporary journalism.
The issue shouldn't be about substituting environmentalism as faith, it's what is our purpose in life. The science is there, but I don't believe most people are prepared to deal with the consequences of what we're seeing all around us.
DDT failed to check Malaria in India
September 7, 2006
http://www.hinduonnet.com/2006/09/27/stories/2006092701891500.htm
DDT in India
June 2, 2008
http://www.countercurrents.org/shaji020608.htm
May 17, 2000
http://www.brown.edu/Research/EnvStudies_Theses/full9900/creid/malaria_in_india.htm
�70-80% of the malaria control money in India is spent on insecticides (Dhingra et al., 1998).�
India began using DDT in 1946 and since then deaths from malaria has increased. Malaria has become resistant to DDT.
�As of 1996, individuals of An. culicifacies, one of the six most important vectors of malaria in India, had been found resistant to DDT in 18 states and 286 districts, to HCH (hexachlorobenzene) in 16 states and 233 districts, and to malathion in 8 states and 71 districts.�
Who can argue that this is not robbing a nation of its
resources and its future by damaging the reproductive health of its women and
creating a malady of health issues for the disfigured children? People can sit around and criticize all day, but what are we doing to help change the plight of a people who are physically getting sick? We need a new paradigm shift and living a life according to Islamic principles can do just that.
DDT failed to check Malaria in India September 7, 2006 http://www.hinduonnet.com/2006/09/27/stories/2006092701891500.htm <!--[if !supEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
One recent study found clear neurological effects, including developmental delays, among babies and toddlers exposed to DDT in the womb. Researchers in Mexico and South Africa found elevated levels of DDT in the blood of people living in areas where DDT was used to control malaria, and breastfed children in those areas received more DDT than the amount considered "safe" by WHO and FAO. Studies have also linked exposure to increased risk of breast cancer, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer lists DDT as a possible human carcinogen. |
DDT in India June 2, 2008 http://www.countercurrents.org/shaji020608.htm <!--[if !supEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
May 17, 2000 http://www.brown.edu/Research/EnvStudies_Theses/full9900/creid/malaria_in_india.htm <!--[if !supEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
�70-80% of the malaria control money in India is spent on insecticides (Dhingra et al., 1998).� |
India began using DDT in 1946 and since then deaths from malaria has increased. Malaria has become resistant to DDT.
<!--[if !supEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
�As of 1996, individuals of An. culicifacies, one of the six most important vectors of malaria in India, had been found resistant to DDT in 18 states and 286 districts, to HCH (hexachlorobenzene) in 16 states and 233 districts, and to malathion in 8 states and 71 districts.� <!--[if !supEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
Who can argue that this is not robbing a nation of its resources and its future by damaging the reproductive health of its women and creating a malady of health issues for the disfigured children? |
People can sit around and criticize all day, but what are we doing to help change the plight of a people who are physically getting sick?
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We need a new paradigm shift and living a life according to Islamic principles can do just that. |
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