And the smallpox virus. Let’s get that little fucker back in circulation. It’s very valuable.
Perhaps not. But if I am saving the lives of umpteen billion people, are you obliged to not prevent me from doing so?
The "obviously"s are unnecessary. Hundreds of millions of people since the beginning of recorded history have died from malaria. DDT cannot even aproach a couple orders of magnitude of that figure. Heck, I don’t even think one person has died from DDT.
No comment…
However, foolsguinea: you might want to go here. You’re currently being PITified…
Just a head’s up…
I was going to link that.
:mad::wally:p:D
Sorry to dredge this up again, but a relevant BBC article was just released. If nothing else, it’s got a scary pic of a mosquito staring at you. Here’s part of it.
As usual, my opinion on this matter is pretty much dead center. DDT saves tens of millions of lives in developing countries or during war time. The use of DDT under these situations can, quite simply, not be argued against. It’s obscene overuse on the farms of peace time first world nations was and is inappropriate.
There, a position we can all agree on.
Great article by my personal hero (;)) on this topic. I believe it is the “New Yorker” article mentioned above:
Pesticides, like everything else in an insect’s environment, provide evolutionary pressure, and will inevitably and inarguably lead to new and improved insects. According to my memory of a passage in The Beak of the Finch, this has been documented to have already happened. We are, if I remember correctly, losing a greater percentage of crops to insects now than we were before the widespread use of pesticides, because we’ve forced the pests to evolve beyond the effects of the pesticides. Clearly the situation is more complex than the OP appears to understand.
Rachel Carson did not create Malaria, so Rachel Carson is not responsible for any deaths. If she shed some light on the downside of one method of fighting Malaria, then she has in effect catalyzed a sort of evolutionary pressure on the agriculture/pesticide . . . system (for lack of a better word).
This can only be a good thing all around.
Further, the need to preserve the species of birds that were threatened by DDT was not simply an aesthetic consideration; nor is it important only to those of us bird geeks who can tell the difference between a kestrel and a sparrow hawk*. Most of the birds (AFAIK, all of the birds) that were affected by DDT were birds of prey.
Imagine the state of worldwide pestilence and disease and agricultural disaster we’d be in if there were nothing higher on the food chain that rats and mice.
[sup]*Trick question.[/sup]
Kinda like the fanatics during the Bubonic plague killing all the cats-assuming they were witches.
Was that true, btw?
No, the cats were not really witches. 