DDT
tlambert | March 7, 2008Monckton tells Glenn Beck how he organised the lawsuit against An Inconvenient Truth:
What happened is that I looked at Al Gore's movie with mounting horror and I identified three dozen scientific errors in it. So I had a weather mate of mine who takes an interest in these matters and also had the money to pay for a court case and I said I thought this film was rubbish. Two weeks later he rang up and said he wanted to do something to fight back against this tide of unscientific freedom-destroying nonsense, which is what global warming is really all about. And so I said, well, the best thing…
tlambert | March 6, 2008Good old Christopher Monckton speaking at the Global Warming Denial Conference
According to Monckton, the movement behind global warming alarmism can be traced to some ugly things, and being wrong about it could have a grave impact on humanity.
"I think the question you're asking is who's behind the scare," Monckton said. "There's been a long history of scares recently and scientific frauds of various kinds. It began, I suppose, with the eugenics movement in the 1930s which led to Hitler. It followed on with the Lysenko movement in Russia under Stalin. It went on with the great leap back…
grrlscientist | February 27, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, endocrine disruptors, environmental pollutants, DDT metabolites, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, birdsong, physiology, behavior
European Starling, Sturnus vulgaris.
Image: Gerd Rossen [larger view].
An elegant but disturbing paper was just published that documents that biologically relevant concentrations of endocrine disrupting pollutants are affecting the quality and quantity of song produced by male songbirds, which in turn, influences female mate choice. According to the research team, not only do these pollutants influence behavior, but they also affect…
tlambert | February 17, 2008Reader James reports that the DDT ban myth is repeated in a new book:
Over the last few decades, however, the WHO has discouraged
the use of DDT in member states â encouraged by environmentalists,
who have often massively overstated the negative effects of
DDT on human and animal health (Roberts et al., 2000). Until
recently, most Western aid agencies discouraged the use of DDT and
indoor residual spraying generally, and the WHO has provided little
financial assistance to those governments that wish to go down this
route.
They also run down bednets.
While bednets may have a role in…
tlambert | February 12, 2008Kim Larsen has an extensive story on DDT and malaria in onEarth. An extract:
DDT proponents are generally reluctant to acknowledge the complicating and protean factor of mosquito resistance. Entomologist May Berenbaum finds this galling. An expert on insecticide metabolism, Berenbaum is director of the entomology department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Read the entomological literature of the 1950s," she said in a telephone interview. "Way before Silent Spring, scientists were already trying to understand resistance. That's what insecticide toxicology was all about back…
tlambert | February 10, 2008At Malaria Matters, Bill Brieger suggests that a new report offers a "revisionist malaria history":
A new report on the implementation of Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) by the World Health Organization begins with the following 'historical' perspective: "In the 1950s and 1960s the WHO led malaria eradication campaign eliminated the risk of malaria infection for about 700 million people mainly in Europe, Asia and Latin America within a period of about 20 years using IRS as a major tool. In the 1980s, following the global consensus to replace malaria eradication campaign by a long term control…
tlambert | February 1, 2008
The World Health Organization has a new report showing dramatic decreases in malaria in Rwanda and Ethiopia following the large-scale distribution of long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs) and artemisinin-combination therapy drugs (ACTs) :
Our investigation showed that declines of malaria cases and deaths
were dramatic in Rwanda and Ethiopia (>50%) and occurred within 12-24
months of nationwide 11 distribution of LLINs and ACTs. In fact,
declines in in-patient cases and out-patient laboratory-confirmed
cases occurred within 60 days of nationwide distribution in Rwanda
(Figure 4). In both…
tlambert | January 1, 2008Allan Schapira is skeptical about the new call for malaria eradication:
As much as I would like to point to progress in 2007 comparable to last year's advances, I feel compelled to point out that in international health, a development is taking place that may lead to wastage of resources, disillusionment, and ultimately loss of human life. A number of global leaders have now turned their eyes to elimination and eradication of malaria,[1] and malaria control is once again becoming a dirty word as it was in the 1950s, when malaria experts had convinced themselves and political leaders that the…
tlambert | November 21, 2007Discover has a good article on Rachel Carson, DDT and malaria. Unlike many other recently published articles (e.g. the New York Times) it gets the science right:
But elsewhere, the picture is murkier. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 500 million cases of malaria occur each year, resulting in an estimated 1 million deaths. Most of these cases of illness and mortality occur in sub-Saharan Africa. But no one can say whether malaria rates have increased or declined in Africa as a whole in recent decades because of difficulties in collecting data, says Valentina Buj, public-…
tlambert | October 26, 2007The Lancet provides a brief history of the attempt to eradicate malaria.
In 1955, WHO set out to rid the world of malaria. The campaign, called the Global Malaria Eradication Programme, focused on vector control. The plan was to interrupt malaria transmission primarily by attacking the malaria's mosquito vector with the potent, new insecticide dicholoro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT). It was thought that if the parasite's cycle of transmission from human to mosquito and back again could be blocked for 3 years, the parasite, and with it the disease, would disappear.
Scores of nations joined…
tlambert | October 4, 2007Revere reports on a new paper that found that women with the highest DDT exposure had a five-fold elevated breast cancer risk:
This is one study, albeit a well conducted one by experienced investigators. It is also relatively small, limited by the number of historical stored serum samples. But the effect is large, which makes it less likely we are seeing the consequences of some hidden bias (an unmeasured variable related to breast cancer risk that differs dramatically in the high DDT group versus its comparison). It is possible for such differences to exist, but for such a large effect the…
tlambert | September 26, 2007Last year I wrote about the inaccurate claims that the World Health Organization had reversed its policy on DDT when it had in fact supported its use all along.
A recent paper in Lancet Infectious Diseases 2007; 7:632-633 also concludes that there has been little real change. Authors Hans J Overgaarda and Michael G Angstreicha write:
In September, 2006, WHO alarmed many of us working toward a reduction in the use of toxic chemicals such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT). In a press release, the organisation announced the promotion of DDT for indoor spraying against malaria mosquitoes…
tlambert | September 21, 2007Aaron Swartz has written a nice article giving the story of the anti-environmentalist war on Rachel Carson.
tlambert | September 17, 2007Ed Darrell writes about the fools promoting DDT as a solution to West Nile virus. It's as if these people think that there are no other insecticides in the world. And he has more examples in a later post: Steve Milloy and Henry Miller.
tlambert | August 28, 2007It's often claimed by DDT advocates that the 1972 ban on the agricultural use of DDT was made in spite of a report that cleared DDT from harm. Jim Easter has found and posted a copy of the report. It turns out that things aren't exactly as DDT advocates present them.
tlambert | August 20, 2007The Washington Post reports:
Long-lasting, insecticide-treated mosquito nets should be distributed free, rapidly and widely in malaria-endemic areas, World Health Organization officials said here Thursday, setting new guidelines for fighting the mosquito-borne disease around the globe.
For years, a policy debate has raged not so much over the effectiveness of mosquito nets in preventing the disease, but over how best to distribute them. ...
Thursday's announcement "ends the debate" over which method is best, said Arata Kochi, director of WHO's global malaria program. "No longer should the…
tlambert | August 18, 2007Members of the "we hate Rachel Carson" club have been touting a new study on indoor residual spraying as showing that DDT remains effective against malaria even when the mosquitoes are resistant. For examples, see Angela Logomasini and Ron Bailey. The study found that DDT-resistant mosquitoes were still repelled from huts sprayed with DDT so that occupants would be protected from 73% of mosquitoes. But it also found that there was 92% protection with dieldrin, which mosquitoes were not resistant to. In other words, an insecticide that killed the mosquitoes worked better, as you might…
tlambert | August 16, 2007DDT hoax spreader Walter E Williams has a new anti-environmentalist column where he writes:
In one long-term study, volunteers ate 32 ounces of DDT for a year and a half, and 16 years later, they suffered no increased risk of adverse health effects.
You know, two pounds of DDT is a lot of DDT. It's a bit worrying that Williams felt it plausible that volunteers would chow down on 2 pounds of DDT every day for a year and a half.
This 1979 WHO report on DDT toxicity reports that a single dose of 1500 mg of DDT (1/20 of an ounce) had these effects:
Prickling of tongue and around mouth and nose…
tlambert | August 10, 2007Ed Darrell is working is way through the inaccuracies in junkscience.com's "100 things you should know about DDT". He's up to the claim that DDT prevented 500 million deaths:
First, the mathematics are simply impossible: At about 1 million deaths per year, if we assume DDT could have prevented all of the deaths (which is not so), and had we assumed usage started in 1939 instead of 1946 (a spot of 7 years and 7 million deaths), we would have 69 million deaths prevented by 2008. As best I can determine, the 500 million death figure is a misreading from an early WHO report that noted about 500…
tlambert | July 18, 2007Nick Matzke finds that Michael Finkel in the National Geographic is guilty of some sloppy reporting:
The article, for once, actually sensitively discusses the issue of DDT use, and notes accurately (for once) that environmental groups and governmental agencies were not and are not opposed to intelligent use of DDT for malaria control. However, it still has one scientist repeating the anti-environmentalist propaganda that a (mythical) DDT ban killed tens of millions of children in malarious countries. This extremely serious claim is completely unsupported by any study as far as I know. See DDT…