Reason TV with an interview with the authors of The Excellent Powder: DDT’s Political and Scientific History
In The Excellent Powder: DDT’s Political and Scientific History, Richard Tren and Donald Roberts argue that the infamous insecticide is the world’s greatest public-health success stories, saving millions of lives by preventing insect-borne disease. Unfortunately for those in areas still infested with mosquitoes and other flying bugs, DDT is also the world’s most-misunderstood substance, the target of a decades-long scientifically ignorant and ideologically motivated campaign that has vastly limited its use and applications.
From Rachel Carson in the 1960s to contemporary critics, DDT has been the object of what Roberts, a professor of tropical public health at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, calls “scare campaigns” that link DDT to “theoretical harms to wildlife and human life that simply don’t exist.”
Have you ever read Eric Flint’s “1632” series? They decide to make DDT to help stop the black plague (if I remember correctly).
We have the banning of DDT to thank for the resurgence of those nasty critters: bed bugs. Ugh. There is almost no way to kill those suckers.
And “Silent Spring” got DDT stopped in the Third World. Even though it is safer, easier, cheaper, and LONGER LASTING than those damned bug nets they keep pimping at Coastal Elite begging events.
Of course, I also understand that Rachel Carson MADE UP her data in her little propaganda tome (that is still hailed as being sent down from above inscribed on plates of gold by environmentalists).
So we can thank the Greens for killing millions of Third World children as well.
Depopulating the third world has always been an environmentalist goal.
Yep, they want to turn it back into a ‘natural’ paradise… sigh…
Geodkyt: India still manufactures DDT. When some Greenie whines about it, they just tell them they aren’t going to accept another 22,000 malaria deaths a year to save a few birds.
Well, good on India! Real World dead babies beat imaginary dead birds anyway.