Tim Worstall reports that James Lovelock (who I criticised earlier for his global warming alarmism) has fallen for the myth that the use of DDT against malaria is banned. In his new book Lovelock writes:
"insecticides badly needed controlling, but the indiscriminate banning of DDT and other chlorinated insecticides was a selfish, ill informed act driven by affluent radicals in the first world. The inhabitants of tropical countries have paid a high price in death and illness as a result of their inability to use DDT as an effective controller of malaria"
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I've been doing a little research into how the Rachel-killed-millions hoax was spread. In The War Against the Greens (1st edition, published in 1994), the argument appears, but it is confined to the lunatic fringe:
"How many people have died as a result of environmental policies like the banning…
Gary Becker and Richard Posner have written a pair of posts about DDT and there is much wrong with what they have written.
Becker writes:
The world Trade Organization (WTO) declared in 1998 a "war on malaria" that aimed to cut malaria deaths in half by 2010. Instead, deaths from malaria have been…
Yes, the DDT ban myth is back, this time in "DDT Returns" by Apoorva Mandavilli that reads like a press release by DDT advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria. It's in Nature Medicine of all places and is subscription only, but because I'll be quoting the bits that are wrong or misleading you'll see…
Steve Forbes writes:
There is a simple, time-proven way to virtually eradicate malaria: the judicious use of DDT. Extremist environmentalists have cowed health officials into never even considering the use of DDT. We are not talking about the large-scale, indiscriminate spraying of the stuff that…
More info here of the myths. See home page for lots more.
http://info-pollution.com/ddtban.htm
http://info-pollution.com/moreddt.htm
4/27/2007 12:57:35 PM
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