Roger Blake wrote:
On 2015-09-22, Mayayana wrote:
There should be arrests.

Should there have been arrests of EPA miscreants (or the environmentalists
that petitioned them to do so) for the hatchet job they did on DDT? This
resulted in millions of third-world deaths from malaria due to other
countries following our lead:

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/v...ry.asp?id=1259

This article is not exactly accurate.

In the fifties, DDT was amazing, it worked great. We put it between our
sheets. You could spray it in the air and see insects dropping out right
and left.

But... by the seventies, mosquitoes (at least in Hawaii where I lived)
had pretty much become immune to the stuff. Enormous, absolutely enormous
amounts were necessary to kill insects. This is why there were environmental
effects. My father had a gadget that would drop a mix of diesel and DDT into
the muffler of the lawnmower and the smoke would kill mosquitoes, but by
the seventies it wasn't killing them any more, even with a couple pounds of
the stuff being burned.

Give it another forty years or so and we might be able to start using DDT
in a small way again. But it was the massive overuse and abuse of DDT that
got us to the point where it was banned, not some crazy left-wind conspiracy.

And yes, it WAS one of the big weapons in the fight against malaria, and it
was a crime to lose that weapon. But it wasn't politicians that lost it.
--scott


--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."