DDT
tlambert | January 16, 2010Via Ed Darrell I learn that Patrick T. O'Shaughnessy will give a talk Jan 19 at the University of Iowa on the history of DDT and malaria and the myth about them.
O'Shaughnessy has written the definitive account of Operation Cat Drop. Worth a look!
tlambert | October 10, 2009Seriously. And then a gullible journalist named Michael Coren wrote it down and put it in the Winnipeg Sun. Ed Darrell has the details.
tlambert | October 9, 2009As part of its ongoing war on science, Quadrant Online as published a piece by J.F. Beck accusing Rachel Carson of constructing an elaborate tissue of exaggerations and lies.
In his piece Beck is only able to come up with two alleged lies by Carson. First, Beck claims that Carson said that DDT was the product of World War II weapons research:
Carson's suggestion notwithstanding, DDT was not a product of World War II weapons research, having been first synthesised in 1874.
But Beck is lying. Here is what Carson actually wrote about the development of DDT:
DDT (short for dichloro-diphenyl-…
tlambert | September 12, 2009The New York Times reports:
The number of children dying before their fifth birthdays each year has fallen below nine million for the first time on record, a significant milestone in the global effort to improve children's chances of survival, particularly in the developing world, according to data that Unicef will release on Thursday.
The child mortality rate has declined by more than a quarter in the last two decades -- to 65 per 1,000 live births last year from 90 in 1990 -- in large part because of the widening distribution of relatively inexpensive technologies, like measles vaccines and…
tlambert | August 19, 2009Ed Darrell comments on the latest attack on Rachel Carson in a war that has being going on since 1962:
"Not Evil, Just Wrong" is slated for release sometime on October 18. This is the film that tried to intrude on the Rachel Carson film earlier this year, but managed to to get booked only at an elementary school in Seattle, Washington -- Rachel Carson Elementary, a green school where the kids showed more sense than the film makers by voting to name the school after the famous scientist-author.
The film is both evil and wrong. ...
That's a whopper about every 15 seconds in the trailer -- the…
tlambert | August 13, 2009Johann Hari on the alarming development of artemisinin resistance
But then something began to change - at first imperceptibly - in the forgotten forests of Western Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge held their last stand-off. The drug that is most effective at treating malaria is called artemisinin: it shocks the parasite out of your system and saves your life. But in south-east Asia, horrified doctors have discovered that the malaria parasite is becoming resistant to it. In a Darwinian arms race, it has begun to evolve a way to beat the treatment. It is taking twice as long to work - and soon…
tlambert | August 10, 2009May Berenbaum is an entomologist at UIUC and been correcting the Rachel-Carson-killed-millions hoax for a while now. Public Radio International has interviewed Berenbaum for a podcast on DDT and malaria. She is also answering questions on the forum there. Predictably Marjorie Mazel Hecht, editor of Larouche's 21st Century Science & Technology has shown up to push the line that all that you have to do is spray DDT to solve the malaria problem.
awild | August 10, 2009This week, Public Radio International is hosting a forum whereby you- the fine people of the General Public- get a chance to converse online with eminent entomologist May Berenbaum about all things DDT.
The forum accompanies a piece from last week's "The World". For background, you can read Berenbaum's recent Washington Post essay about the DDT-malaria problem here:
What people aren't remembering about the history of DDT is that, in many places, it failed to eradicate malaria not because of environmentalist restrictions on its use but because it simply stopped working. Insects have a…
tlambert | June 16, 2009
Hey, remember how Monckton got published in a UFO magazine? Well, now he's in a Larouche publication, Executive Intelligence Review (see cover to right), being interviewed about the IPCC plan to RULE THE WORLD.
However, they are not concerned
with whether there is a problem or not. They
merely wish to pretend that there is a problem, and try
to do so with a straight face, for long enough to persuade,
not the population, because we have no say in
this, but the governing class in the various memberstates
of the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change: That they should hand over…
tlambert | June 11, 2009Seed Magazine has interviewed epidemiologist Barbara Eskanazi about her survey article on the effects of DDT on human health:
SEED: What kinds of long-term health problems can we expect?
BE: I don't really know. I can't predict, but I can say that if the studies that I read hold true we may see higher rates of diabetes; we may see higher rates of breast cancer; we may see higher rates of male infertility. We may see poor neurodevelopment in children. We may also see more spontaneous abortions. ...
SEED: How do we balance the malaria-fighting benefits of DDT with this information about long…
tlambert | June 3, 2009Adam Sarvana of the Natural Resources News Service has written a detailed story on the career of Roger Bate:
Call major mainstream environmental groups and ask them for comment on Roger Bate. The reply is always: Who? Like most policy wonks at conservative think tanks, few have ever heard of him. That is why he wins. Anyone who wants to understand the policy battles that lie ahead in this country - not to mention those already past - should study his career carefully. This is true for Republicans looking for an antidote to President Obama, environmental advocates he has consistently outwitted…
tlambert | May 24, 2009The United Nations Environment Programme and the World Health Organization have announced new projects to test methods for fighting malaria with less use of DDT:
Ten projects, all part of the global programme "Demonstrating and Scaling-up of sustainable Alternatives to DDT in Vector Management", involving some 40 countries in Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean and Central Asia are set to test non-chemical methods ranging from eliminating potential mosquito breeding sites and securing homes with mesh screens to deploying mosquito-repellent trees and fish that eat mosquito larvae.
The new…
tlambert | May 1, 2009A recent peer-reviewed scientific paper in Malaria Journal by Yukich, Lengeler, Tediosi, Brown, Mulligan, Chavasse, Stevens, Justino, Conteh, Maharaj, Erskine, Mueller, Wiseman, Ghebremeskel, Zerom, Goodman, McGuire, Urrutia, Sakho, Hanson and Sharp compared several large vector control programs to prevent malaria, including both insecticide-treated nets (ITN) and indoor residual spraying (IRS). The results:
Method
cost per child death averted
Conventional ITNs
$438-$2199
Long-lasting ITNs
$502-$692
IRS
$3933-$4357
Even using IRS, DDT was not the most cost effective insecticide,…
tlambert | February 6, 2009Bug girl writes about a new paper on insecticide resistance of bedbugs. It turns out the resistance mechanism (kdr) means that they are resistant to DDT and pyrethroids. She concludes:
DDT will be utterly useless against bed bugs, so people should stop asking for it.
We're going to need a lot more research on ways to kill bedbugs other than just poisoning them with the usual pesticide suspects.
In cities where there are active bed bug populations, insecticide choice for resistance management will be very important in urban entomology.
Bedbugs are not going to go away, and you should…
tlambert | October 7, 2008This is the long-awaited part 2 of my response to Roger Bate's reply to the article on DDT in Prospect by John Quiggin and me. (Part 1 is here.) In this part I look at Bate's false history of DDT and malaria.
Here's Bate's history:
But while there were serious concerns about the bioaccumulation of DDT up the food chain, and it was rightly phased out for use in agriculture, it still had a valid role in combating public health menaces, notably disease-bearing mosquitos. Not satisfied with having DDT outlawed for agriculture, environmentalists increased pressure for a total ban in the late…
tlambert | July 12, 2008Glenn Reynolds can't seem to learn that if he links to JF Beck he will get burnt. He links to Beck because Beck claims to prove that:
Self-proclaimed DDT expert Tim Lambert was wrong, of course, to claim Europeans did not threaten trade sanctions against DDT users.
But all the story that Beck links to says is that a company that sells organic cotton (ie produced without the use of pesticides) rejected cotton after DDT spraying in the area.
Reynolds should have paid attention to what the EU ambassador wrote:
The European Union has no objection to the safe spraying of houses with DDT for…
tlambert | May 30, 2008Sideshow Roy Spencer writes:
Our environmental protection practices have already caused the deaths of millions of people, mainly in poor African countries. By far the most humans -- mostly women and children -- have been sacrificed in the mistaken belief that the use of any amount of the pesticide DDT would harm the environment. As a result, the preventable disease malaria has continued to decimate Africa.
Only recently has this genocide disguised as environmentalism been partly reversed through the reinstituted practice of twice-yearly DDT treatments of the entryways to homes. While most…
tlambert | May 27, 2008John Quiggin has some comments on Roger Bate's response to our article in Prospect on Rachel Carson. My response to Bate will take more than one post.
Let's start with this paragraph:
I was never a tobacco lobbyist. After I wrote two articles on tobacco-related topics in 1996 and 1997, I consulted for Philip Morris, at their request, on international health for a total of about a month in 1998. I never lobbied for the company or promoted cigarettes in any way. I subsequently wrote to Philip Morris asking them to provide funding for a campaign to rehabilitate the use of DDT. This letter,…
tlambert | May 12, 2008I think this article in Prospect on Rachel Carson and DDT is quite good.
Update: John Quiggin has posted the director's cut.
tlambert | May 1, 2008Arnold Kling decides to spread the DDT ban myth:
According to Iain Murray's new book, the worst disasters come from environmental policy. It is remarkable the magnitude of the harm caused by government relative to the harm caused by the private sector from which it protects us. ...
The total death and illness caused by all of the chemical pollution ever created vs. the death and illness caused by the ban on DDT.
After he was corrected by commenters he added an update, but did not correct his false claim. To justify this he just made more more false claims:
The term "banned" may not be…