Saturday, June 29, 2013
Perhaps the Most Ridiculous Thing of All Time
About 10 years ago, Zimbabwe's department of health was told to stop using DDT (a perfectly safe non-carcinogenic) because many of its farmers were concerned that their tobacco (a fully known carcinogenic) was going to be rejected by the Europeans if even a trace amount of DDT was found on it....I mean, is that frigging absurd or what? The morons should have probably been more concerned about trace amounts of tobacco on their DDT!
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10 comments:
Not exactly"perfectly safe".
There is zero evidence of DDT ever having harmed a single human being and even the damage to birds probably wasn't the DDT but the fact that it was mixed with much more noxious substances such as fuel oil or petroleum distillates.......Yeah, maybe perfectly safe wasn't the right phrase but compared to malaria, I'll take it any day (as did virtually every Western country when it was confronted with malaria, typhus, etc.).
It doesn't look like my link came through. Let me do it this way.
http://www.chem.duke.edu/~jds/cruise_chem/pest/effects.html
And from here:
http://www.epa.gov/pbt/pubs/ddt.htm
What harmful effects can DDT have on us?
Probable human carcinogen
Damages the liver
Temporarily damages the nervous system
Reduces reproductive success
Can cause liver cancer
Damages reproductive system
Workers at the Montrose Chemical Company (where they actually made the stuff) absorbed 400 times as much DDT as the average American in the 1960s, but not a single case of cancer was ever reported (ditto, all of the soldiers who were doused with it after the war to prevent typhus). NOT ONE.......As for the infamous rat study, yeah, some of them did develop tumors but what the researchers failed to inform us was that these types of rats eventually develop tumors anyway and that it had absolutely NOTHING to do with DDT.......Jerry, this is a substance that has literally saved millions and millions of lives and the withholding of it from developing countries is flat out killing people.
This is actually an interesting exchange, but the sides fall into the usual pattern: Jerry takes the authoritarian side (trust the rulers, not the people), and Will has a healthy attitude toward science, coupled with an even healthier attitude toward tending to trust the people, and to give into the authoritarian impulse only when necessary.
And I'm not even saying that we have to use it like we used to. Just spray it on the insides of huts twice a year. As a repellent. Saves lives.
dmarks, there you go again just making stuff up. I simply commented on Will's statement about the about DDT being perfectly safe, and presented a couple of articles (scientific stuff that you imply I ignore) to show that it is not perfectly safe. Will happened to agree with me when he said, "Yeah, maybe perfectly safe wasn't the right phrase..." I said nothing about the ban on DDT, or the government. If we banned stuff based on its safety only, we would ban tobacco, the automobile, booze, and McDonalds.
"dmarks, there you go again just making stuff up. "
Hasn't happened yet, and if it did here, it would have been the first time.
DDT is just one of many insecticides, but it is relatively
inexpensive. Mosquitos have been
showing signs of developing resistance and other insect toxins
are coming on line:
"DDT has already been replaced by organophosphate or carbamate insecticides such as malathion or bendiocarb where DDT resistance has been detected, e.g. in Sri Lanka, parts of India, Pakistan, Turkey and Central America. However, these compounds are considerably more expensive to use than DDT, and malathion does not persist well on mud walls.
Pyrethroids such as deltamethrin and lambdacyhalothrin are effective at far lower doses than DDT (c.25 mg/sq. metre compared with 2 gm/sq. metre). Although more expensive per unit weight, these pyrethroids are not much more expensive per house protected per year (Curtis, 1994). They are also much more acceptable to householders because they leave no visible deposit on walls and because they kill nuisance insects such as cockroaches. Therefore rates of refusal of spraying by householders are lower with pyrethroids than with DDT and therefore there is a much better chance of reaching a level of coverage at which the vectorial capacity of the mosquito population will be lowered to a point at which malaria transmission will be interrupted.
BB, the resistance argument would make more sense if DDT was just an insecticide. It isn't. It's also a repellant.......As for the new compounds coming down the pike, you don't have to convince me about them. It's the radical environmentalists who seem to be totally against anything chemical.
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