DDT about to be reintroduced as pesticide

UPI: DDT about to be reintroduced as pesticide
One of the most controversial chemicals on Earth DDT is about to make a comeback as a prime weapon in the fight against malaria in Africa. Scientists say DDT helped eradicate malaria from the United States during the 1940s, but was indiscriminately overused for agricultural purposes during the 1950s and 1960s.

Beginning in the 1970s, the United States and several European nations banned the pesticide, largely due to concerns about environmental harm. Pressure from international agencies also led many African countries to abandon DDT’s use.

More from National Geographic:

DDT to Return as Weapon Against Malaria, Experts Say DDT, a notorious symbol of environmental degradation, is poised to make a comeback.

International experts are touting the widely banned pesticide as a best bet to save millions of human lives threatened by malaria.

The disease, which kills mostly children and pregnant women, is largely spread by mosquitoes.

The overwhelming majority—90 percent—of malaria victims live in Africa, where the disease plagues both human and economic health (Africa facts, maps, more).

More from the New York Times:

W.H.O. Supports Wider Use of DDT vs. Malaria The World Health Organization on Friday forcefully endorsed wider use of the insecticide DDT across Africa to exterminate and repel the mosquitoes that cause malaria. The disease kills more than a million people a year, 800,000 of them young children in Africa.

It’s about time! The junk science that triggered the ban on DDT was disproved decades ago, yet the myth that it is somehow dangerous still persists at the cost of over one million lives per year.

Even this article mentions excessive farm use of DDT, the danger of which is also subject to debate.

Some think the the WHO actually encouraged the ban on DDT in order to force population reduction in Africa. That would sound like paranoia, but for the WHO memos written in the 1960s that actually said it.

Reuters article here:
DDT returns to battle malaria in Africa

Read more about the fraud perpetuated on the world (in order to ban DDT) here:
100 things you should know about DDT

Read more about … “The Lies of Rachel Carson” by Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, One of Rachel Carson’s earliest and most outspoken critics. (Full text, without tables and illustrations, from the Summer 1992 21st Century)

Read this article from Reason in 2002:

Silent Spring at 40 … Rachel Carson’s classic is not aging well. On June 14, 1972, 30 years ago this week, the EPA banned DDT despite considerable evidence of its safety offered in seven months of agency hearings. After listening to that testimony, the EPA’s own administrative law judge declared, “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man…DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man…The use of DDT under the regulations involved here [does] not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife.” Today environmental activists celebrate the EPA’s DDT ban as their first great victory.

Another article from Reason in 2004:

DDT, Eggshells, and Me, Cracking open the facts on birds and banned pesticides I maintain that it is indeed “generally acknowledged” that DDT thins the eggshells of sensitive raptors. But the enviros won the fight about DDT in America, so why is it still a sensitive political issue today? The main reason is the continuing fight to save millions of people from malaria. Whatever it does to different types of eggshells, DDT remains unquestionably one of the most effective ways to control the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite. (emphasis mine, ed.) But international environmentalists have instituted through the UN strict controls on DDT, with an eye on an eventual permanent ban.

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