Bug girl has discovered the Carson-killed-millions claims by the likes of Steve Milloy, Angela Logomasini and John Tierney and decided to:
focus on the stuff that as an entomologist, I'm uniquely qualified to comment on. I know about bugs. I know about pesticides. I've taught parasitology for over 5 years.
For the benefit of Angela Logomasini, who thinks that malaria is caused by a virus, this is relevant because malaria is actually caused by a parasite.
Bug girl does a thorough job of debunking the four main claims of the DDT fetishists:
- Banning DDT in the past caused the deaths of millions of people from malaria.
- DDT spraying now will save millions of people in the 3rd world from malaria
- Mosquito resistance is not an issue.
- DDT is safe.
More like this
If there's one thing I've learned over the last decade-plus of blogging about medicine and alternative medicine, it's that any time there is an outbreak or pandemic of infectious disease, there will inevitably follow major conspiracy theories about it. It happened during the H1N1 pandemic in the…
While the New York Times has some great reporting on science (eg Carl Zimmer and Andrew Revkin it also has some poor quality reporting (eg William Broad and Tina Rosenberg. John Tierney's latest column fits into the second category, with the usual ill-supported claims that Carson killed many many…
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…
Andrew Kenny in The Spectator
writes
Judged on sheer evil, the worst crime in history was brown, the Nazi
genocide, although the reds slaughtered more people. The death toll
(difficult to measure) is roughly, Hitler's holocaust 6 million,
Stalin's famine and terror 8 million, and Mao's famine 30…
Yay! Thanks! :)
It's about time somebody wrote this up properly. I've been getting increasingly worried that the DDT myths were not being effectively challenged. Bug Girl has restored my faith that there is some common sense out there.
thank you
Ulric
Well, I guess that we won't be hearing the Rachel Carson is a mass murderer crap any more.
Do you have a reference for the "malaria virus" thing? My Google-fu seems weak tonight.
Angela Logomasini [in an interview](http://www.foodchainradio.com/shows/544Bddt.mp3) at 17:20 (my emphasis):
>We used a lot of DDT in the environment and we eradicated the mosquitoes that carried the **virus** and the way the **virus** works is they're saying ... the human is the host and so as long as there are humans with the **virus** in them and other mosquitoes bite them, those mosquitoes bite somebody else; those people end up getting sick. But once you break that cycle, you keep the humans away from the bad mosquitoes -- the **virus** dies out and that's what we were able to do using DDT.
Egad.
Well, she does at least have a *vague* idea of how the cycle works.
Would love to have someone ask her about trophozooites. :)
But it is a virus, just like all you evil enviro-nazi commie b&%$%*ds!
Many thanks!
I think there's definitely a virus involved here, but it hasn't been properly identified. (Agent Smith voice) "Steve, John, Angela — you are the virus, and we. . . are the cure."