There is no doubt in my mind that for me, at least, DDT is completely harmless. I am not sure if I would want others to consume it, though. By the way, one of the jokes about me goes like this – "Vladimir, why are you naked, barefoot and radioactive? It's no big deal. They simply dropped a few nuclear bombs on me by a mistake. What makes you think that they did it by a mistake? Because, the consequences of using violence are always unpleasant. You don't really think that they want to suffer more, do you?"
--- In Politics_CurrentEvents_Group@yahoogroups.com, Carl Spitzer <cwsiv@...> wrote:
>
>
> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/4264030/DDT-is-safe-just-ask-the-professor-who-ate-it-for-40-years.html
>
>
>
> By Terence Kealey
>
> 12:00AM BST 19 Jul 2001
>
> THE World Health Organisation, Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, the
> UN environmental programme and its development programme, USAID, and
> almost all the other international representatives of the great and the
> good now campaign against DDT.
>
> But, perversely, the Third World still uses it. To those who believe
> that America under George W Bush and his gas-guzzling,
> permafrost-drilling accomplices is the source of all global pollution,
> this Third World defection is disappointing. Where are the virtuous
> blacks when we need them?
>
> DDT was introduced as an insecticide during the 1940s. In Churchill's
> words: "The excellent DDT powder has been found to yield astonishing
> results against insects of all kinds, from lice to mosquitoes."
>
> And astonishing they were. DDT was particularly effective against the
> anopheles mosquito, which is the carrier of malaria, and people once
> hoped that DDT would eradicate malaria worldwide. Consider Sri Lanka. In
> 1946, it had three million cases, but the introduction of DDT reduced
> the numbers, by 1964, to only 29. In India, the numbers of malaria cases
> fell from 75 million to around 50,000.
>
> But, in 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the book that
> launched the environmental movement. In that book, Carson showed how DDT
> was imperilling wildlife, particularly predators at the top of the food
> chain that accumulated the chemical in their fat and in their thinning
> egg shells.
>
> Within a decade, the developed countries had banned DDT, as did some
> developing countries, to the detriment of their health. In Sri Lanka,
> cases of malaria soon rose to 500,000. Worldwide, malaria has returned
> with a vengeance, accounting annually for 300 million cases and, sadly,
> one million deaths, mainly of children.
>
> As the Third World now knows, there is no ready substitute for DDT. The
> spraying of houses with DDT prevents malaria because most people are
> infected after dusk as they sleep indoors. DDT permeates the walls of
> buildings, and a single spray will provide indoor protection for months.
>
> Other chemicals are available, but they are generally less effective,
> shorter-acting and - most importantly for the Third World - more
> expensive. And DDT is extraordinarily safe for humans. Prof Kenneth
> Mellanby lectured on it for more than 40 years, and during each lecture
> he would eat a pinch.
>
> Nor need DDT imperil wildlife. The destruction that Carson described was
> caused by the agricultural use of DDT as a mass insecticide in vast
> quantities on crops. But the discriminating application of DDT indoors
> involves only a tiny, contained, environmentally tolerable, reversible
> fraction of the dose. That is why some international health (as opposed
> to environmental) agencies, including Unicef, still support the
> judicious use of DTT. Even the WHO is now softening its stance.
>
> Malaria was once endemic in Britain. Cromwell died of it and both Pepys
> and Shakespeare described it. Until the 1930s, it was still active in
> Essex. But we are lucky in our frosty climate, which kills anopheles,
> and we have eradicated the disease. Yet Greenpeace and other
> environmental agencies resist the appropriate use of DDT in the tropics.
>
> Politics has long bedevilled malaria. Its first effective cure was
> quinine, which was discovered by Jesuit missionaries in South America
> during the 1630s, but for decades Protestants preferred to die rather
> than swallow "Jesuit's Powder". Today, Third World health is endangered
> by comfortable Western environmentalists, some of whom, discreetly, view
> black natives as threats to the local wildlife.
>
> Supporting those black natives, however, are two researchers, Richard
> Tren and Roger Bate, whose Malaria and the DDT Story, recently published
> by the Institute for Economic Affairs in London, shows how to foster
> both a healthier and an environmentally friendlier Third World.
> Greenpeace, in its self-assurance, embodies a contemporary cultural
> imperialism as offensive as any Jesuit's.
>
> * The author is the vice-chancellor of Buckingham University
>
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