“Silent Spring” (Rachel Carson)
I didn't think I'd even have to comment on how ridiculous the claim is, but perhaps I do. Because, you know, environmentalists frequently kick down people's doors in the middle of the night, and take wrong-thinking Americans to concentration camps where the brutal, yoga-trained environmentalists force-feed their captives a steady diet of organic cantaloupe, filtered water, and tofu until death mercifully arrives. We don't hear about it on the evening news because the environmentalists control the corporate media.
Or something like that. Maybe this Hilter guy (located in a small boarding house in Minehead, Somerset) hasn't killed anyone because he's biding his time, planning his strategy.
Rachel Carson's birthday bashing | Salon News:
Novelist Michael Crichton has a front seat on the bandwagon. He took on DDT and climate change in his footnote-studded 2004 novel, “State of Fear.” “Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler,” his protagonist alleges. “And the environmental movement pushed hard for it.”
The Coburn/Crichton talking points have infected the mainstream press. In his New York Times Science column this month, John Tierney thrashed Carson's warnings about insecticides and argued that her voice still “drowns out real science.” Over at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Bill Steigerwald blamed “environmentalists spooked by Rachel Carson” for banning a “miracle weapon” that is “like Kryptonite to the mosquitoes.”
...
“Groups are latching onto the emotional impact of the malaria story, which is truly a human tragedy, to discredit environmentalists,” says John M. Balbus, chief health scientist with Environmental Defense. “Are there places where DDT may have been beneficial? Probably, yes.” But is the 1970s DDT ban “the cause for rampant malaria and millions of deaths? Absolutely not.”Historians and scientists have shown that despite some benefits of DDT, few African countries made the pesticide a part of their malaria control efforts over the past quarter century. Many factors led to the decreased use of DDT -- factors that had nothing to do with Carson. In fact, the decline in DDT use coincided with a drop in malaria rates.
Socrates Litsios, a historian and former scientist for the World Health Organization (the agency that has headed global malaria control efforts since the 1960s), says the assertion that “Silent Spring” and the DDT ban led to millions of deaths is “outrageous.” May Berenbaum, head of the Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has studied mosquitoes and malaria, says that “to blame environmentalists who oppose DDT for more deaths than Hitler is worse than irresponsible.”
The problem is that the mosquitos build up resistance to DDT - evolution and all that. Tom Coburn doesn't believe in evolution so that isn't a problem for him, and his followers.
Mosquitoes can evolve resistance to any insecticide. In India, DDT-resistant mosquitoes were reported as early as 1959. “Insects will develop resistance to insecticides,” says entomologist Berenbaum at the University of Illinois. “This is one sure thing you can count on.”Mosquitoes, Berenbaum says, can develop resistance in any number of ways -- biologically, biochemically, even behaviorally. In some regions, mosquitoes might develop resistance by becoming physically immune to the effects of DDT. In other populations, mosquitoes might evolve new behaviors, such as avoiding inside walls and resting on the unsprayed outer walls of homes after biting their victims.
Relying on insecticide alone to control malaria ignores big pieces of the puzzle, Berenbaum says. Mosquitoes may be the carrier, but it's the Plasmodium parasite that causes malaria. “It's not just the mosquito. There's a pathogen involved, and there are people involved. To reduce this extremely complicated situation to one bad guy is beyond simplistic,” she says.That oversimplified argument seems to suit Coburn, Crichton and their cohorts in the press.
Damn, that Mr. Hilter.
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