5 ms·

Not to be That Guy, but millions and millions of these deaths were preventable. The UN vote to effectively ban DDT has got to be one of the worst public health

by guscost 13y ago

Not to be That Guy, but millions and millions of these deaths were preventable. The UN vote to effectively ban DDT has got to be one of the worst public health disasters in history. It is sickening. http://www.fightingmalaria.org/article.aspx?id=1862 http://www.fightingmalaria.org/article.aspx?id=1862 http://perc.org/articles/legacy-ddt-ban http://perc.org/articles/legacy-ddt-ban http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ddt-use-to-combat-malaria/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ddt-use-to-combat-... http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/15583-ddt-breeds-death http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/15583-dd...

zerohm 13y ago
Why trade a public health disaster for an environment disaster that will likely lead to a different public health disaster? Current restrictions seem reasonable. "The Stockholm Convention, which took effect in 2004, outlawed several persistent organic pollutants, and restricted DDT use to vector control. The Convention has been ratified by more than 170 countries and is endorsed by most environmental groups. Recognizing that total elimination in many malaria-prone countries is currently unfeasible because there are few affordable or effective alternatives, public health use is exempt from the ban pending acceptable alternatives." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddt#Restrictions_on_usage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddt#Restrictions_on_usage
- guscost 13y ago
  > Why trade a public health disaster for an environment disaster that will likely lead to a different public health disaster? This is a false dichotomy. And regarding your other point: “Every life saved this year in a poor country diminishes the quality of life for subsequent generations.” -Paul Ehrlich, 1968 “By using DDT, we reduce mortality rates in underdeveloped countries without the consideration of how to support the increase in populations.” -Michael McCloskey, 1971 “So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” -Alexander King, 1990 "An end to the continued domestic usage of the pesticide was decreed on June 14, 1972, when William D. Ruckelshaus, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, issued an order finally cancelling nearly all remaining Federal registrations of DDT products." http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/ddt-ban-takes-effect http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/ddt-ban-takes-effect "WHO actively promoted indoor residual spraying for malaria control until the early 1980s when increased health and environmental concerns surrounding DDT caused the organization to stop promoting its use and to focus instead on other means of prevention." http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2006/pr50/en/ http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2006/pr50/en/ "Thanks largely to the use of DDT in Namibia, malaria related hospital admissions and deaths fell by 92% (29,059 to 2,264) and 96% (1,370 to 46) between 2001 and 2009. Similar trends have been seen in Botswana, South Africa, and Swaziland. For these benefits to be outweighed by risks requires reproducible evidence that DDT is dangerous, but none exists. WHO’s latest assessment found no evidence for concern “about levels of exposure for any of the end-points that were assessed” in carcinogenicity, reproductive toxicity, or developmental toxicity. Yet despite this endorsement and admirable malaria control results, UNEP is trying to eliminate DDT again. As major UNEP donors, including the European Union, have endorsed WHO’s position, UNEP’s motivations are unclear." http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e6801?ijkey=H4KijaZlhGvkDLK&keytype=ref http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e6801?ijkey=H4KijaZlhGvkD...
  - saraid216 13y ago
    > This is a false dichotomy. It really wasn't. It was a claim about the continued usage of DDT.
  - zerohm 13y ago
    So, you are arguing that DDT is being banned simply as a means of population control? "WHO actively promoted indoor residual spraying for malaria control until the early 1980s when increased health and environmental concerns surrounding DDT caused the organization to stop promoting its use and to focus instead on other means of prevention." By your quote there, it sounds like the World Health Organization stopped promoting the use of DDT 30 in homes years ago due to health and environmental concerns. Is that part of the conspiracy too?
    - guscost 13y ago
      It seems to be more of a regrettable alliance between chemical companies, conservationists who refuse to compromise when it comes to the environment, their elected representatives, and yes, a few Club-of-Rome type genocidal misanthropes who actually think that the planet is not big enough for everyone and so other people should have to die. A conspiracy only in the sense that Julian Assange uses the word.
jcromartie 13y ago
This is hyperbole. The DDT "ban" was on agricultural use. Many countries have continuously used DDT for malaria prevention, and some countries have successfully controlled malaria without any DDT at all.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
One of the things about DDT, in addition to everything else, is insects can and do develop resistance to it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Mosquito_resistance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Mosquito_resistance
tzs 13y ago
DDT spread way too broadly in the ecosystem, to species it had never been tested on, and it persisted a long time. It was known to interfere with critical species such as nitrogen-fixing bacteria. This is not something you want to mess around blindly with, which is what we did by putting DDT into widespread use without adequate testing. There are three effective ways to control insects. 1. Poison them with something that is dangerous to a wide variety of life. 2. Poison them with something that is narrowly targeted to the species you are trying to control and is harmless to other species. 3. Deal with them mechanically, such as by crushing them or tearing them apart. DDT and similar pesticides take the #1 approach. To do that safely you have to carefully control the spread of your pesticide so that it doesn't spread to species you do not want to harm. You can do this by being very careful in how it is applied, and designing it to break down quickly and not spread beyond the application area. We failed in this aspect with DDT. The #2 approach is quite feasible. The way it works is that you base your pesticide on hormones of your target species. Insects are essentially biological robots running conceptually simple and very inflexible state machines. Various hormones control this, triggering various programs that run on the state machine. For instance, there might be a particular hormone that activates in the males when the weather changes, triggering in males a flight to find a female, and after that program runs the male dies. A different hormone might trigger female mating behavior. Entomologists can study that species, and identify the various behavior programs built into the insect state machine, and figure out what hormones active which programs. Then a pesticide can be designed that mimics the hormone that starts the male mating subroutine. Spray that on them when it is not the right time of the year, so the females are not having their mating program trigger, and the males will go do their (now futile) mating flight and die. The best part about this is that it is safe for other species, because these program control hormones for one species are almost always harmless to other species up the food chain. (To be up the food chain from something, you kind of need to have evolved to not be bothered by its hormones). Another nice thing about the #2 approach is that the pests do not develop immunity. If an insect develops immunity to, say, the hormone that triggers its mating flight, then it is not going to mate when that trigger fires naturally, and so whatever mutation provided that immunity dies off. The #3 approach is also quite feasible...and no, I don't mean importing cheap migrant workers to go out with tweezers in the fields and crush insects. :-) I'm talking about finding an insect the preys upon or is a parasite to the insect you want to control, and using it. Entomologists can study a pest species and identify what its enemies and parasites are (and there usually are some), and then you can introduce those to control the pest species. Unlike higher forms of like, like reptiles and birds and mammals, insects tend to be very picky about what they prey upon or what they are parasites to. If you've got a particular species of invasive insect from Florida destroying your California citrus crop, and you import the species of parasitic wasp that kills the pest, when it kills them it does not turn to some other species for hosting services. It dies. The big problem with #2 and #3 is that there are a lot of insect species, and a lot of predator and parasite species, and not a lot of entomologists. This is discussed in the excellent book "Life on a Little Known Planet" by Howard Ensign Evans [1]. He was one of the worlds leading experts on parasitic wasps. There are hundreds or thousands of species of them, most very small (the size of pinhead or smaller). In the book, he tells the story of that pest destroying the California crop. Officials did try to import the parasitic wasp from Florida that kept the pest in control there. It failed. Eventually, after the crop was destroyed, they found out why. It turns out that what was thought to be one species of parasitic wasp was actually two, which are almost identical, except one of them was NOT a parasite for the particular species they were trying to control. With hundreds of species of parasitic wasps and very few parasitic wasp experts in the world, no one had looked at this one species close enough to have noticed that there were really two species. The kind of observation and experimentation is takes to learn enough about the insect state machines to make the hormone mimicking pesticides, or to learn enough about an insect's predators or parasites to effectively and safely control the pest biologically, takes a long time. Industry is not interested in funding that. They want entomologists to work on type #1 poisons, not to spend 20 years in the lab studying one species to identify a key hormone. Academic entomologists who want to pursue these studies aren't pulling in the big grants, either. Evans tells of having to advise a graduate student to NOT specialize in parasitic wasps, despite the student's interest in and talent at it, because he would not be able to get funding for research in that area. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Life-Little-Known-Planet-Biologists/dp/1558212493 http://www.amazon.com/Life-Little-Known-Planet-Biologists/dp...

by guscost 13y ago

zerohm 13y ago

Why trade a public health disaster for an environment disaster that will likely lead to a different public health disaster? Current restrictions seem reasonable. "The Stockholm Convention, which took effect in 2004, outlawed several persistent organic pollutants, and restricted DDT use to vector control. The Convention has been ratified by more than 170 countries and is endorsed by most environmental groups. Recognizing that total elimination in many malaria-prone countries is currently unfeasible because there are few affordable or effective alternatives, public health use is exempt from the ban pending acceptable alternatives." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddt#Restrictions_on_usage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddt#Restrictions_on_usage

guscost 13y ago
> Why trade a public health disaster for an environment disaster that will likely lead to a different public health disaster? This is a false dichotomy. And regarding your other point: “Every life saved this year in a poor country diminishes the quality of life for subsequent generations.” -Paul Ehrlich, 1968 “By using DDT, we reduce mortality rates in underdeveloped countries without the consideration of how to support the increase in populations.” -Michael McCloskey, 1971 “So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” -Alexander King, 1990 "An end to the continued domestic usage of the pesticide was decreed on June 14, 1972, when William D. Ruckelshaus, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, issued an order finally cancelling nearly all remaining Federal registrations of DDT products." http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/ddt-ban-takes-effect http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/ddt-ban-takes-effect "WHO actively promoted indoor residual spraying for malaria control until the early 1980s when increased health and environmental concerns surrounding DDT caused the organization to stop promoting its use and to focus instead on other means of prevention." http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2006/pr50/en/ http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2006/pr50/en/ "Thanks largely to the use of DDT in Namibia, malaria related hospital admissions and deaths fell by 92% (29,059 to 2,264) and 96% (1,370 to 46) between 2001 and 2009. Similar trends have been seen in Botswana, South Africa, and Swaziland. For these benefits to be outweighed by risks requires reproducible evidence that DDT is dangerous, but none exists. WHO’s latest assessment found no evidence for concern “about levels of exposure for any of the end-points that were assessed” in carcinogenicity, reproductive toxicity, or developmental toxicity. Yet despite this endorsement and admirable malaria control results, UNEP is trying to eliminate DDT again. As major UNEP donors, including the European Union, have endorsed WHO’s position, UNEP’s motivations are unclear." http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e6801?ijkey=H4KijaZlhGvkDLK&keytype=ref http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e6801?ijkey=H4KijaZlhGvkD...
- saraid216 13y ago
  > This is a false dichotomy. It really wasn't. It was a claim about the continued usage of DDT.
- zerohm 13y ago
  So, you are arguing that DDT is being banned simply as a means of population control? "WHO actively promoted indoor residual spraying for malaria control until the early 1980s when increased health and environmental concerns surrounding DDT caused the organization to stop promoting its use and to focus instead on other means of prevention." By your quote there, it sounds like the World Health Organization stopped promoting the use of DDT 30 in homes years ago due to health and environmental concerns. Is that part of the conspiracy too?
  - guscost 13y ago
    It seems to be more of a regrettable alliance between chemical companies, conservationists who refuse to compromise when it comes to the environment, their elected representatives, and yes, a few Club-of-Rome type genocidal misanthropes who actually think that the planet is not big enough for everyone and so other people should have to die. A conspiracy only in the sense that Julian Assange uses the word.

jcromartie 13y ago

This is hyperbole. The DDT "ban" was on agricultural use. Many countries have continuously used DDT for malaria prevention, and some countries have successfully controlled malaria without any DDT at all.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago

One of the things about DDT, in addition to everything else, is insects can and do develop resistance to it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Mosquito_resistance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Mosquito_resistance

tzs 13y ago

DDT spread way too broadly in the ecosystem, to species it had never been tested on, and it persisted a long time. It was known to interfere with critical species such as nitrogen-fixing bacteria. This is not something you want to mess around blindly with, which is what we did by putting DDT into widespread use without adequate testing. There are three effective ways to control insects. 1. Poison them with something that is dangerous to a wide variety of life. 2. Poison them with something that is narrowly targeted to the species you are trying to control and is harmless to other species. 3. Deal with them mechanically, such as by crushing them or tearing them apart. DDT and similar pesticides take the #1 approach. To do that safely you have to carefully control the spread of your pesticide so that it doesn't spread to species you do not want to harm. You can do this by being very careful in how it is applied, and designing it to break down quickly and not spread beyond the application area. We failed in this aspect with DDT. The #2 approach is quite feasible. The way it works is that you base your pesticide on hormones of your target species. Insects are essentially biological robots running conceptually simple and very inflexible state machines. Various hormones control this, triggering various programs that run on the state machine. For instance, there might be a particular hormone that activates in the males when the weather changes, triggering in males a flight to find a female, and after that program runs the male dies. A different hormone might trigger female mating behavior. Entomologists can study that species, and identify the various behavior programs built into the insect state machine, and figure out what hormones active which programs. Then a pesticide can be designed that mimics the hormone that starts the male mating subroutine. Spray that on them when it is not the right time of the year, so the females are not having their mating program trigger, and the males will go do their (now futile) mating flight and die. The best part about this is that it is safe for other species, because these program control hormones for one species are almost always harmless to other species up the food chain. (To be up the food chain from something, you kind of need to have evolved to not be bothered by its hormones). Another nice thing about the #2 approach is that the pests do not develop immunity. If an insect develops immunity to, say, the hormone that triggers its mating flight, then it is not going to mate when that trigger fires naturally, and so whatever mutation provided that immunity dies off. The #3 approach is also quite feasible...and no, I don't mean importing cheap migrant workers to go out with tweezers in the fields and crush insects. :-) I'm talking about finding an insect the preys upon or is a parasite to the insect you want to control, and using it. Entomologists can study a pest species and identify what its enemies and parasites are (and there usually are some), and then you can introduce those to control the pest species. Unlike higher forms of like, like reptiles and birds and mammals, insects tend to be very picky about what they prey upon or what they are parasites to. If you've got a particular species of invasive insect from Florida destroying your California citrus crop, and you import the species of parasitic wasp that kills the pest, when it kills them it does not turn to some other species for hosting services. It dies. The big problem with #2 and #3 is that there are a lot of insect species, and a lot of predator and parasite species, and not a lot of entomologists. This is discussed in the excellent book "Life on a Little Known Planet" by Howard Ensign Evans [1]. He was one of the worlds leading experts on parasitic wasps. There are hundreds or thousands of species of them, most very small (the size of pinhead or smaller). In the book, he tells the story of that pest destroying the California crop. Officials did try to import the parasitic wasp from Florida that kept the pest in control there. It failed. Eventually, after the crop was destroyed, they found out why. It turns out that what was thought to be one species of parasitic wasp was actually two, which are almost identical, except one of them was NOT a parasite for the particular species they were trying to control. With hundreds of species of parasitic wasps and very few parasitic wasp experts in the world, no one had looked at this one species close enough to have noticed that there were really two species. The kind of observation and experimentation is takes to learn enough about the insect state machines to make the hormone mimicking pesticides, or to learn enough about an insect's predators or parasites to effectively and safely control the pest biologically, takes a long time. Industry is not interested in funding that. They want entomologists to work on type #1 poisons, not to spend 20 years in the lab studying one species to identify a key hormone. Academic entomologists who want to pursue these studies aren't pulling in the big grants, either. Evans tells of having to advise a graduate student to NOT specialize in parasitic wasps, despite the student's interest in and talent at it, because he would not be able to get funding for research in that area. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Life-Little-Known-Planet-Biologists/dp/1558212493 http://www.amazon.com/Life-Little-Known-Planet-Biologists/dp...