Explanation from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:
See the Gates Foundation site, “Can we really eradicate malaria?”
How many times do they call for a return to DDT?
What do you think?
Eradicate malaria – here’s how
May 24, 2009
3 Comments | 
Africa, Asia, Disease, Health care, Malaria, Politics, Public health | Tagged: Africa, Gates Foundation, Health care, Malaria, Politics, Public health | 
Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
War on malaria: Wall Street Journal and bloggers side with malaria
May 24, 2009It’s spring. Each of the past four years, spring has been the time that the anti-Rachel Carson, anti-environmental protection, anti-environmentalist, pro-DDT groups throttle up their campaigns to impugn Carson and environmentalists, and argue that all we need to do is poison Africa to make the world safe from malaria.
Here’s where Col. Renault joins us from Casablanca to say “Round up the usual suspects.” It’s spring 2009. Henry I. Miller of the Hoover Institution could be along any moment to say we need DDT to fight West Nile Virus, though DDT is not the pesticide of choice even among pesticide professionals.
The Wall Street Journal has become a favorite venue for these poison-the-Earthers as it has left rational policy decisions behind, at least in the editorial and op-ed pages. Steven Milloy’s got a book out slandering environmentalists, Green Hell, and a new blog to promote the book. No doubt someone will trot out Gordon Edwards’ Lyndon-Larouche-tainted claims against Rachel Carson, though none of them check out.
Sure enough, Green Hell blog picks it up repeating the old canard about how a day without DDT is like a day of genocide. You can’t teach a stupid dog new tricks, you know. In a post title that drips with calumny, Milloy says “Greens re-boot African genocide.” They have no case; smears must do the work.
Let’s dissect the WSJ piece, eh?
In 2006, after 25 years and 50 million preventable deaths, the World Health Organization reversed course and endorsed widespread use of the insecticide DDT to combat malaria. So much for that. Earlier this month, the U.N. agency quietly reverted to promoting less effective methods for attacking the disease. The result is a victory for politics over public health, and millions of the world’s poor will suffer as a result.
So much error in so little space! The error-to-word ratio may be a new land speed record.
Were there 2 million deaths per year from malaria, we could say malaria killed 50 million people in the last 25 years. But for many, or most of the past 35 years, the death rate has hovered around 1 million, sometimes lower. That’s still too high for those of us who think malaria should be beaten, but it’s not 2 million a year. WSJ exaggerates the death figures — what else do they exaggerate? If they have a case, why do they need to exaggerate?
WHO never abandoned DDT for specific uses. There was no policy for WHO to reverse in 2006. WHO made it clear that they would continue to use DDT where appropriate, and where local governments would allow. WSJ, new to the business of caring about Africans afflicted by malaria, doesn’t know the history.
DDT’s effectiveness against malaria-carrying mosquitoes began to wane by 1950. By the mid-1960s, many populations of mosquitoes had developed resistance and even immunity to DDT. That was why the World Health Organization (WHO) abandoned its campaign to eradicate malaria. Overuse of DDT, especially in agriculture, led to rapid evolution of resistance among mosquitoes. Without a weapon that worked as DDT had worked before resistance, the campaign could not succeed.
The Journal is simply wrong when it says only less-effective methods are left. DDT’s greatly reduced effectiveness is part of the reason; but research over the past five years, in tests run broadly in several African nations, shows that bednets reduce malaria infections by between 50% and 85%. That is much more effective than DDT in broadcast spraying.
One of the things WSJ fails to mention — maybe they don’t know, there is much demonstration of ignorance in the editorial — is that DDT is not used in broadcast spraying to fight malaria. Such campaigns proved disastrous because they killed off the predators of mosquitoes more effectively than they killed the mosquitoes, and because they often produced harmful results in other ways. Along some African rivers, the spraying campaigns killed off a lot of fish local people used for food. The dangers of DDT have been demonstrated in Africa.
WHO had championed a campaign in the late 1950s and 1960s to eradicate malaria. The strategy was to use DDT to knock down local mosquito populations for six months or a year, and in that time treat humans infected with the malaria parasites so that, when the mosquitoes came back, there would be no pool of malaria infection among humans from which to draw malaria to spread.
Alas, the overuse of DDT caused mosquitoes to develop resistance before the malaria-fighters could get into the field in some places and get the health care components of the campaign to work.
Because of the worldwide resistance to DDT among insects, DDT cannot be counted on as a panacea against malaria in any case. While it was never the panacea, never the sole tool to beat the disease, its role has been dramatically reduced by the rise of resistance to the chemical.
The U.N. now plans to advocate for drastic reductions in the use of DDT, which kills or repels the mosquitoes that spread malaria. The aim “is to achieve a 30% cut in the application of DDT worldwide by 2014 and its total phase-out by the early 2020s, if not sooner,” said WHO and the U.N. Environment Program in a statement on May 6.
Citing a five-year pilot program that reduced malaria cases in Mexico and South America by distributing antimalaria chloroquine pills to uninfected people, U.N. officials are ready to push for a “zero DDT world.” Sounds nice, except for the facts. It’s true that chloroquine has proven effective when used therapeutically, as in Brazil. But it’s also true that scientists have questioned the safety of the drug as an oral prophylactic because it is toxic and has been shown to cause heart problems.
Where was the Wall Street Journal when these studies were proposed, when they were run, and when they were reported? WHO and health care agencies in affected countries carefully worked to find non-DDT solutions to malaria. All programs to fight malaria require good health care systems, to diagnose malaria in victims, accurately as to the form of parasite affecting the victim, and to treat the disease to restore health to the victim and remove that person from the pool of people from whom mosquitoes can draw new malaria to infect others. The results are in. The treatment works. Now comes WSJ to pose questions that have already been answered? They are too late, and wrong.
Most malarial deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa, where chloroquine once worked but started failing in the 1970s as the parasite developed resistance.
Fascinating. In discussions with the pro-DDTers, resistance of mosquitoes to DDT is generally denied. But here the WSJ cites similar resistance by the parasite. Remember, dear reader, that the DDTers are selective in their use of evidence.
Even if the drugs were still effective in Africa, they’re expensive and thus impractical for one of the world’s poorest regions. That’s not an argument against chloroquine, bed nets or other interventions. But it is an argument for continuing to make DDT spraying a key part of any effort to eradicate malaria, which kills about a million people — mainly children — every year. Nearly all of this spraying is done indoors, by the way, to block mosquito nesting at night. It is not sprayed willy-nilly in jungle habitat.
DDT is more expensive than bednets. DDT is used now only for indoor residual spraying (IRS). Hut walls are treated with DDT to kill or repel mosquitoes after they have already bitten a victim; this prevents the spread of some parasites, at least in the bodies of the mosquitoes killed. IRS requires some expensive work, however. First, analysis of the mosquitoes must be done to be sure DDT is effective; annd second, a professional or highly-trained person must apply the stuff. DDT applications have to be repeated about every six months. They cost about $12.00 each time. IRS may decrease malaria infection by as much as 35% (I’m being liberal).
In contrast, bednets decrease malaria infection by 50% to 85%. They cost about $10.00 for the expensive ones, and they last five years. In tests and in practice in Africa over the past five years, bednets have proven to be a necessary and very effective method to fight malaria. Bednets work without DDT (there are alternative chemicals available for IRS); DDT can’t work without bednets.
There is strong opposition to use of DDT even for IRS, in Uganda, for example, where cotton and tobacco farmers have sued to stop the use. In other areas, local people still fear fish kills. DDT is controversial because of local opposition to it, not because of any environmental group’s action.
And the net result is that DDT is not the cheapest nor most effective method to fight malaria. It is an increasingly expensive, controversial, and decreasingly effective tool.
But here is the bottom line: Unless malaria is wiped out in human hosts, there will always be mosquitoes ready to spread the disease from one infected human to a dozen uninfected humans. The key to eliminating malaria is not killing every mosquito on Earth, as quixotic a goal as that may be; the key is to develop methods of curing humans quickly and well and interrupting the life cycle of the parasite. Drugs are expensive? DDT cannot substitute for drugs, regardless how cheap it is.
WHO is not saying that DDT shouldn’t be used. But by revoking its stamp of approval, it sends a clear message to donors and afflicted countries that it prefers more politically correct interventions, even if they don’t work as well. In recent years, countries like Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia have started or expanded DDT spraying, often with the help of outside aid groups. But these governments are also eager to remain in the U.N.’s good graces, and donors typically are less interested in funding interventions that WHO discourages.
These campaigns have provided little success against malaria — nothing on the scale of success of bednets.
Oddly, one of the greatest roadblocks to the use of DDT in Africa since 2000 was the Bush administration, which refused to allow any U.S. dollars for the purchase of DDT or treatment. There are foggy signs the Bush policies eased in 2008. But again, it may simply be that the opportunity to use DDT is gone. It’s time to move on to fight malaria, and quit tilting at the DDT windmill.
“Sadly, WHO’s about-face has nothing to do with science or health and everything to do with bending to the will of well-placed environmentalists,” says Roger Bate of Africa Fighting Malaria. “Bed net manufacturers and sellers of less-effective insecticides also don’t benefit when DDT is employed and therefore oppose it, often behind the scenes.”
Roger Bate acts as a shill for malaria over recent years. Despite the name of his organization, he stands opposed to any effective means of fighting malaria, and he always stands for poisoning Africa. His claims here are directly contradicted by the results of campaigns run by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a group which has dedicated its time and an astounding amount of money to beating malaria. Bill Gates has no axe to grind on the issue — the foundation encourages bednets and medical care, and is relatively silent about DDT. The Foundation’s work has saved more lives in the past three years than Roger Bate has in more than a decade of promoting DDT. The Gates Foundation clearly is more credible.
All other serious experts tend to agree with the Gates Foundation path as well.
It’s no coincidence that WHO officials were joined by the head of the U.N. Environment Program to announce the new policy. There’s no evidence that spraying DDT in the amounts necessary to kill dangerous mosquitoes imperils crops, animals or human health. But that didn’t stop green groups like the Pesticide Action Network from urging the public to celebrate World Malaria Day last month by telling “the U.S. to protect children and families from malaria without spraying pesticides like DDT inside people’s homes.”
Pesticide Action Network is probably the only so-called green organization as crazy against DDT as Roger Bate is crazy for DDT. Ignore what they say. Pay attention to what’s really going on. (See comments on PAN.) DDT is dangerous — PAN, for any inaccuracies they may have, are more accurate than the pro-p0ison side.
The National Academy of Sciences did a serious study of DDT in the late 1970s, and in a publication on the future of such chemicals in 1980, NAS said that while DDT was at one time a near-miracle working chemical, it is more dangerous than its benefits justify, and it needs to be eliminated from use. The entire world has been working to protect people from dangerous man-made chemicals. The Persistent Organic Pesticides Treaty of 2001 (POPs) calls for an end to use of dangerous chemicals, and singles out a dozen of the most dangerous. DDT is among the dozen most dangerous. POPs includes a waiver to allow DDT use for fighting disease, so even it does not ban the stuff. History shows that DDT decreases in effectiveness, and we discover new dangers from the stuff almost every year. Since we have effective alternatives, and since DDT use has been hamstrung by litigation in Africa and ineffectiveness in the field, now is a great opportunity to end DDT use with very little harmful effect.
“We must take a position based on the science and the data,” said WHO’s malaria chief, Arata Kochi, in 2006. “One of the best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual spraying. Of the dozen or so insecticides WHO has approved as safe for house spraying, the most effective is DDT.” Mr. Kochi was right then, even if other WHO officials are now bowing to pressure to pretend otherwise.
Kochi was right to call for IRS then — and since we now have effective alternatives to DDT to use in IRS, WHO is right again to call for a reduction in DDT use in 2009. We must take a position based on the science and the data, after all.
DDT is less effective than alternatives, and more expensive. DDT is a killer once released in the wild. DDT is unnecessarily controversial where it might do the most good, and therefore even less effective than it might be. How can the Wall Street Journal come to any different conclusion, if they’re looking at the economics and science? Who would have suspected political string-pulling at WSJ?
Rachel Carson was right. 47 years after Silent Spring is not too soon to eliminate DDT use.
___________
Here’s one indicator of the silly and bizarre exaggerations pro-DDT people tend to use: This guy claims DDT had eliminated polio. In an otherwise over-the-top claim that Rachel Carson is a mass murderer — a claim that is false in all respects — the author goes even farther, claiming DDT effectiveness as a pharmaceutical against a disease like polio where there is no record for DDT’s ever having been used.
____________
Even more flight from reality: Climate Change Fraud blog, a site that appears to be a haven for anti-science, reprinted the WSJ editorial and added a bogus history introduction. And another addition to the Wall of Shame: Black and Right.
7 Comments | Africa, Biology, Cost of Green, DDT, Disease, Green Politics, Health care, History, Malaria, Politics, Science | Tagged: Africa, Cost of Green, DDT, Disease, Green Politics, Health care, Malaria, Pesticides, Politics, Rachel Carson, Science, Silent Spring | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Alma conference on DDT and human health calls for DDT phase out (Pine River statement)
May 5, 2009Wheels of science grind carefully, accurately, and consequently, slowly.
The report from last year’s Alma College conference on DDT and human health has been published in .pdf form at Environmental Health Perspectives: “The Pine River Statement: Human Health Consequences of DDT Use.”
Carefully? Check out the pages of references to contemporary studies of human health effects. Each one of the studies cited is denied by the more wild advocates of DDT use, and each of those studies refutes major parts of the case against DDT restrictions.
Warning sign near the old Velsicol plant where DDT was produced, on the Pine River, Michigan. The 1972 ban on DDT use in the U.S. was prompted by damage to wildlife and domestic animals; a 2009 conference noted that human health effects of DDT are also still of great concern, and perhaps cause alone for continuing the ban on DDT.
Warning sign near the old Velsicol plant where DDT was produced, on the Pine River, Michigan. The 1972 ban on DDT use in the U.S. was prompted by damage to wildlife and domestic animals; a 2009 conference noted that human health effects of DDT are also still of great concern, and perhaps cause alone for continuing the ban on DDT.
Accurately? Notice how the conference marks those areas where we do not have good research, such as in the long-term health effects to people who live in the houses that are sprayed with DDT for indoor residual spraying (IRS). While the conference report cites studies showing elevated DDT levels in the milk of women who live in those homes, they draw no unwarranted conclusions. Alas, that leaves the field free for Paul Driessen to rush in and claim there are no ill effects — but read the paper for yourself, and you’ll see that’s far from what the research shows. The paper exposes Steven Milloy’s claims to be almost pure, unadulterated junk science.
Slowly? Well, it’s been more than a year.
The paper makes one powerful statement that is only implicit: The claims that DDT is safe, and that use of the stuff should be increased, are wildly inflated.
The paper’s abstract:
Objectives: Dichlorodiphenyl trichloroethane (DDT) was used worldwide until the 1970s, when concerns about its toxic effects, its environmental persistence, and its concentration in the food supply led to usage restrictions and prohibitions. In 2001, more than 100 countries signed the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), committing to eliminate the use of 12 POPs of greatest concern. DDT use was however allowed for disease vector control. In 2006, the World Health Organization and the U.S. Agency for International Development endorsed indoor DDT spraying to control malaria. To better inform current policy, we reviewed epidemiologic studies published in the last five years which investigated the human health consequences of DDT and/or DDE exposure.
Data Sources and Extraction: We conducted a PubMed search in October 2008 and retrieved 494 studies.
Data Synthesis: Use restrictions have been successful in lowering human exposure to DDT, however, blood concentration of DDT and DDE are high in countries where DDT is currently being used or was more recently restricted. The recent literature shows a growing body of evidence that exposure to DDT and its breakdown product DDE may be associated with adverse health outcomes such as breast cancer, diabetes, decreased semen quality, spontaneous abortion, and impaired neurodevelopment in children.
Conclusions: Although we provide evidence to suggest that DDT and DDE may pose a risk to human health, we also highlight the lack of knowledge about human exposure and health effects in communities where DDT is currently being sprayed for malaria control. We recommend research to address this gap and to develop safe and effective alternatives to DDT.
Rachel Carson was right.
Tell other people about this conference report. This is real science, and it deserves to be spread far and wide.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Ed Lorenz at Alma College, both for providing the news, and for his work to organize the original conference.
Other information:
6 Comments | DDT, Disease, Environmental justice, Environmental protection, Health care, Hoaxes, Junk science, Malaria, Rachel Carson, Research, Science | Tagged: Africa, Alma Conference, DDT, environment, Health care, Health Effects, Junk science, Malaria, Pine River Statement, Rachel Carson, Research, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Swine flu shuts down prisons: Let the prisoners out?
May 3, 2009This headline from the Sacramento Bee sure caught my eye:
Swine flu case shuts down visits at all 33 state prisons
Of course, I read it too fast, and skipped over the word “visits.” I had to click on the story to see whether they were going to tell the prisoners to stay at home for a week, like the Fort Worth, Texas, school district did. I suppose, after a fashion, that was exactly the message.
At the Officer of the Receiver for California Prison Health Care Services, spokesman Luis Patino said Sunday that an inmate in Centinela State Prison in Imperial County was diagnosed as probable for the H1N1 virus, or swine flu.
“The inmate and his cellmate have been isolated, Patino said. “They remain at the prison.”
Whew!
Ticket sales for movies are way up in those areas where the schools are shut down — good news for the opening weekend of X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
Maybe we’d be better off if the kids remained in school, as well as keeping the convicts in the prisons.
Is the panic over swine flu too much? If we go back to the week ending March 21, 2009, we find that there were already more than 22,000 cases of influenza in the U.S., with 35 pediatric deaths. Has the swine flu added to either the rates of infection or the rates of death? If the dramatic steps, the event cancellations and school closings, are appropriate for the swine flu, shouldn’t they have been appropriate for the other flu viruses, too?
Do we really need to close schools? What do you think — tell us in comments.
See the CDC’s report on swine flu at their site: H1N1 (Swine Flu)
Other resources:
- Grrl Scientist posted a short, informative video about how viruses jump species, at Living the Scientific Life:
- Tara Smith’s blog, Aetiology, is loaded with solid information; “Why are the schools closing,” “What does the WHO’s pandemic scale mean?,” “Swine flu – deja vu all over again?” and others
- Effect Measure, “Swine flu: mini science primer on anti-virals“
- Discovering Biology in a Digital World, wonders whether you cough safely
Leave a Comment » | Disease, Health care, History, Influenza, Journalism, medicine, News | Tagged: CDC, Disease, Epidemic, Health care, Influenza, Journalism, medicine, News, Pandemic, Swine Flu | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Applying evolution theory to defeat malaria
May 3, 2009If the theory works, why not use it, eh?
One of the most serious problems with the use of DDT is that it tends to drive insects to evolve defenses to pesticides very quickly. Almost every mosquito on Earth today has alleles that allow it to digest DDT, rather than be poisoned by it. These alleles arose shortly after DDT was put into use against mosquitoes, and by the mid-1960s had made fruitless the malaria eradication campaign worked by the World Health Organization.
Evolution can be used to the benefit of humans and the eradication of malaria, too.
Voice of America (remember that agency?) tells the story of Andrew Read, a researcher at Penn State University, who realized that the deadliest mosquitoes are old ones — malaria has to survive for about two weeks in the mosquito in its life cycle in order to be infectious to humans. If the mosquito dies before that time, the malaria can’t be transmitted.
Read’s proposal? He has a fungus that takes a couple of weeks to work, but which kills the mosquito once it gets going.
In other words, Read doesn’t worry about getting all the mosquitoes. His method, if it works, will kill only the mosquitoes most likely to carry malaria.
Plus, since most of the breeding cycle of these mosquitoes will be completed, it won’t drive the mosquitoes to evolve around the problem.
“The good thing about just killing the old ones is that most mosquiotoes will have done most of their reproduction before you kill them, and that means the susceptible mosquitoes will indeed continue to breed, so you still have susceptible mosquitoes, and your insecticides then just work against the old guys, removing them, and they are the dangerous ones. So under those circumstances, you don’t get the evolution of insecticide-resistant mosquitoes.”
He and his colleagues have been testing a kind of fungus that makes mosquitoes sick over the course of several weeks. And it eventually kills the oldest and most infectious mosquitoes.
“The name of the game is not mosquito control. It’s actually malaria control,” Read explains. “So if you just remove the old ones, you still have lots of young, non-dangerous mosquitoes around, but you have controlled malaria.”
Read says this fungus is about 98 to 99 percent effective at killing old mosquitoes in the lab. Now he says he needs to test this fungal insecticide in villages areas where malaria is prevalent, to see whether fewer people get the disease, even if they’re still getting bitten by mosquitoes.
Read and his team propose a new concept of mosquito control, based on what we know about the life cycles of mosquitoes and how they evolve, rather than just looking for one more “new” pesticide to which the insects will soon become resistant. Read’s article appears in the open-access Public Library of Science (PLoS), published April 7, 2009: “How to Make Evolution-Proof Mosquitoes for Malaria Control.” His coauthors are Penelope A. Lynch and Matthew B. Thomas.
Summary
Insecticides are one of the cheapest, most effective, and best proven methods of controlling malaria, but mosquitoes can rapidly evolve resistance. Such evolution, first seen in the 1950s in areas of widespread DDT use, is a major challenge because attempts to comprehensively control and even eliminate malaria rely heavily on indoor house spraying and insecticide-treated bed nets. Current strategies for dealing with resistance evolution are expensive and open ended, and their sustainability has yet to be demonstrated. Here we show that if insecticides targeted old mosquitoes, and ideally old malaria-infected mosquitoes, they could provide effective malaria control while only weakly selecting for resistance. This alone would greatly enhance the useful life span of an insecticide. However, such weak selection for resistance can easily be overwhelmed if resistance is associated with fitness costs. In that case, late-life–acting insecticides would never be undermined by mosquito evolution. We discuss a number of practical ways to achieve this, including different use of existing chemical insecticides, biopesticides, and novel chemistry. Done right, a one-off investment in a single insecticide would solve the problem of mosquito resistance forever.
Among reasons you may want to bookmark that publication: In the opening paragraphs the authors discuss how Indoor Residual Spraying drives mosquito resistance to pesticides, with citations to the most recent and most powerful studies. This is the case against bringing back DDT in a big way.
1 Comment | DDT, Disease, Evolution, Health care, Libraries, Malaria, Public health, Research, Science | Tagged: Andrew Read, DDT, Disease, Malaria, Mosquito Control, Penn State, Public health, Research, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
DDT nutcases
April 11, 2009It’s spring, and nutcase fancies turn to thoughts of slandering Rachel Carson and making unholy noises toward environmentalists.
Here’s one nutcase who engages in that peculiar nutcase practice of completely rewriting posts of commenters — claims to be Graeme Bird; is he really running for office? His claim is that lack of DDT is causing the spread of dengue in Queensland, Australia. He won’t be swayed by reason or fact (of course — his avatar is a photo of confirmed liar Joe McCarthy). He asks “how many have died,” but is unhappy with the official answer (one, but that’s not clear — an older woman in poor health). Nor does he appear to have any sense of irony that drought-stricken Australia has a plague of mosquitoes due to recent rains. Nor does he appear to understand that dengue is an imported disease in Australia, imported by a traveler, it appears.
Australian officials ask people to drain water from pots, old tires (“tyres” downunder), rain gutters, or any other small pool, which is where the vector mosquitoes breed and mature. The nutcase appears unfamiliar with the concept of simply preventing the mosquitoes from breeding, in his rush to poison Australia. Nor do alternative effective techniques for fighting the disease appear to be on his radar.
Alas, there are a lot of these lone nutcases loose. Watch for updates here for a week or so.
- Commenter “Jake” at a Wall Street Journal site
- An odd Canadian site (another site that censors dissenting comments)
- Peter Foster hyperventilates about Al Gore, at The National Post (Canada)
- Commenters at Listverse take up the erroneous meme
- Commenters at Michelle Malkin’s site (of course — would you expect reason there?)
- Bogus science at Creative Minority Report
- Block Rants
- And, speaking of hyperventilating rants . . .
- Adirondack Musing
- Let’s not forget our old carbuncle, Steven Milloy
- Wake Community Network, with the old “genocide” hoax
- Doug Ross @ Journal, adding a 75% fact-free promise to his snark-free pledge
- Blogger News network
I wonder if it’s a virus that makes them censor any fact or opinion contrary to their own, or whether they simply are complete cranks. I mean, even Bush’s Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne got DDT right.
(Bird’s blog is on WordPress, which will automatically post a link from this post to his blog. Anyone want to wager on whether he has enough cojones to let the trackback stand?)
203 Comments | DDT, Disease, Geography - Physical, Rachel Carson, Rampant stupidity, Science | Tagged: Australia, DDT, dengue, mosquitoes, Queensland, Rachel Carson, Rampant stupidity | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Cargo cults in global warming, and Arthur Robinson
March 14, 2009Cargo cult science has deep roots among those who deny global warming or who allow that warming is occurring, but claim we can do nothing about it. So, it’s no surprise that, at the voodoo science 2nd International Conference on Climate Change, somebody would trot out the old falsehoods about DDT.
According to Traditional Catholic Reflections (you can tell its traditional Catholic because it brooks no comments — you can’t correct an error there):
Speaking at the conference hosted by the Heartland Institute in New York City,[Dr. Arthur Robinson, Director of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine] said, “There is a current example of genocide by the removal of technology, and that is the ban on DDT, and that has resulted in the deaths of 30 to 40 million people and has left half a billion infected with malaria.”
It’s malaria that kills people, not a lack of DDT. The removal of DDT from spraying cotton crops in Texas and California did absolutely nothing to promote malaria in Africa. Dr. Robinson needs a basic geography course. Mosquitoes do not migrate from the U.S. to Africa or Asia.
Stopping the spraying of DDT in the U.S. in 1972 wasn’t a factor in the cessation of usage of DDT in Africa seven years earlier, either. Dr. Robinson could use some basic math sequencing and calendar reading remediation, too.
Dr. Robinson could use some history and public policy instruction, too. DDT was never banned in Africa, nor was it banned in India or China which together now produce almost all the DDT used in the world, which is a lot. There’s no ban on DDT in Uganda, where Dr. Robinson’s friends in the business world are suing to stop the spraying of DDT in huts in affected regions — because they are afraid it will harm their tobacco business.
It’s a heckuva lot easier to throw darts at health care workers and disease fighters than it is to talk about real solutions with these guys.
If Robinson is dead wrong on a one-liner about DDT, how wrong do you think he is in the rest of his presentation on climate change?
Is there any crackpot “scientist” who was not at the Heartland Institute’s wing-ding?
18 Comments | Accuracy, Africa, Cargo Cults, Climate change, DDT, Disease, Global warming, Health care, Malaria, Science, Voodoo science, War on Science | Tagged: Africa, Arthur Robinson, Climate change, DDT, Environmental protection, Global warming, health, Malaria, Medical Care, Science, Voodoo science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Found it! Hoax Museum is right: Zinsser got it wrong
January 4, 2009Found it! [See previous post.]
I had done a search for Zinsser’s book, Rats, Lice and History, many weeks ago, and come up dry (how many weeks?).
But a more careful search in Google Books turned up a copy of most of the text, from Read Books — and in that edition, appearing to have been published in London*, there is a page 285!
On that page 285, there is the quote cited, claiming that the bathtub did not come to America until about 1840.
The quote is found in chapter XVI, in the first section, a couple of paragraphs prior to the second section — page 217 in the editions of the book I have.
So, the Hoax Museum is right in saying Zinsser was hoaxed, too. Zinsser’s book appeared first in 1935, with plenty of time for Mencken’s 1917 hoax to have spread into sources Zinsser trusted.
Even the best can be taken in by a hoax crafted well enough, or on a subject obscure enough.
_____________
* RATS, LICE, AND HISTORY, Being a Study in Biography, which, after Twelve Preliminary Chapters Indispensable for the Preparation of the Lay Reader, Deals with the Life History of TYPHUS FEVER. Also known, at various stages of its Adventurous Career, as Morbus pulicaris (Cardanus, 1545); Tabardiglio y puntos (DeToro, 1574); Pin fas Febris pur purea epidemica (Coyttarus, 1578); Febris quam lenticulas vel puncticulas vocant (Fracastorius, 1546); Morbus hungaricus; La Pourpre; Pipercorn; Febris petechialis vera; Febris maligna pestilens; Febris putrida et maligna; Typhus carcerorum; Jayl Fever; Fiévre des hôspitaux; Pestis bellica; Morbus castrensis; Famine Fever; Irish Ague; Typhus exanthematicus; Faulfieber Hauptkrankheit; Pcstartigc Bräune; Exanthematisches Nervenfieber, and so forth, and so forth. By HANS ZINSSER; LONDON, GEORGE ROUTLEDGE, BROADWAY HOUSE, 68-74 CARTER
4 Comments | Accuracy, Disease, Health care, History, Hoaxes, Public health | Tagged: Books, Hans Zinsser, History, Hoaxes, Public health, Rats Lice and History, Typhus | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 