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Every since my grandparents day I have been hearing about people dying and starving in Africa. We can't fix it.
I always heard about the poor starving kids in China. Since China now owns America, and there are no more starving kids there, I guess eating all my vegetables worked. Now, how can we fix Africa??
Watching "American Idol Gives Back" tonight. They went to Africa, and are doing some sort of expose' on how rough people have it there. Doesn't take much producing or acting - they DO have it very rough.
And the most shocking statistic is one they recited near the beginning of the show: Every 30 seconds, someone dies from malaria in Africa. And 90% of all malaria deaths worldwide, occur in Africa.
A death every thirty seconds, is more than a MILLION deaths per year.
And it's not from something like cancer, which no one knows how to prevent or cure. It's from malaria... a disease that has been all but eradicated in many parts of the world. It's spread by the Anopheles mosquito, which carries the germ, and infects a human when the mosquito bites him.
That mosquito has been all but eliminated in the United States and most other modern countries. Thorough spraying with the insecticide DDT has effectively eliminated the threat of malaria in all those countries. Various environmental whackos tried to stop it, naturally, predicting disasters of various magnitudes, but none of their predictions ever came true (this is always the outcome of the whackos' predictions).
But now we find that DDT has been banned, when countries like Africa have people dying by the millions from a disease that DDT could control! And why? Because of fears that a few birds might be harmed! And not even the birds, really - the whackos are worried that the shells of their egg might be the wrong thickness, and a greater percentage of baby birds die than ordinarily do.
Let me get this straight.
These people think that millions of people dying, men women and children, is not too great a price to pay for keeping birds' egg shells the right thickness???
I haven't studied this as much as I usually study things, and I have to believe I missed something that justifies the withholding of a known cure for malaria, with relatively mild side effects, from people who are literally dying for it.
Someone PLEASE tell me what I've left out here.
PLEASE.
You could also just send some treated mosquito nets. Helps prevent malaria and keeps birds happy. Numbers vary, but here's one WHO report. It's also among the "Millenium Development Goals"
It doesn't cause allergies, breathing difficulties, cancer, hives, acne, or anythinng else in humans. Some whacko wrote a book in the 60s hinting that it did, but without citing any evidence. Since then, none of the claims were found true. With the massive use of DDT before then, in the US and other countries, you'd think they would have noticed something, if there were anything to notice.
It does affect the eggshells of some birds. It also saves millions of human lives - lives that are being lost today. What kind of warped mentality bans it in that environment?
Well, it is banned for use in the USA from what I've been reading, and it is STILL in use in tropical areas, probably no reason why it's not being used on the continent of Africa today. It probably is and you don't know about it. And seriously, it's not because of the environmentalists that this stuff got banned, it's because of the effects on humans. Years ago 60 minutes did a program about DDT (I think it was in the 80's - that's how I remembered that it was Dow involved in the production of this stuff).
Here's something from Cornell University about the toxic affects of DDT.
At concentration above 236 mg DDT per kg of body weight, you'll die. Concentration of 6-10 mg/kg leads to such symptons as headache, nausea, vomiting, confusion, and tremors.
Everything I have read suggests this stuff is stored in the fatty cells in humans. It's not a harmless pesticide.
Here is an article from 2001 by the BBC about DDT spraying in South Africa.
So, a moderate concentration turns you into a liberal Democrat?
Looking back over the history of the last 60 years or so, that could explain a lot.
The other thing that's true, of course, is that humans never approach even a fraction of that concentration in the middle of spraying wide areas with DDT to eradicate malaria-carrying mosquitos.
Sounds reminiscent of the scares over Saccharine, back around the same time. Lab rats were given doses of saccarin, and some of them developed various maladies. So saccharin was heavily restricted. It only came out later, that the doses necessary to cause problems, was the equivalent of a human drinking some 700 cans of saccharin-sweetened diet soda PER DAY.
On the other hand, in areas suffering hugely from active malaria, a FAILURE to spray widely with DDT results in nausea, vomiting, dehydration, and millions of deaths... from unchecked malaria delivered by mosquitos. Those millions are dying NOW.
What kind of warped mentality says that these alternatives justify a ban on DDT???
On the other hand, in areas suffering hugely from active malaria, a FAILURE to spray widely with DDT results in nausea, vomiting, dehydration, and millions of deaths... from unchecked malaria delivered by mosquitos. Those millions are dying NOW.
What kind of warped mentality says that these alternatives justify a ban on DDT???
They are spraying widely in Africa. See post #2. Why do you keep repeating the same statement over and over. They are using DDT to control Malaria in Africa.
Watching "American Idol Gives Back" tonight. They went to Africa, and are doing some sort of expose' on how rough people have it there. Doesn't take much producing or acting - they DO have it very rough.
And the most shocking statistic is one they recited near the beginning of the show: Every 30 seconds, someone dies from malaria in Africa. And 90% of all malaria deaths worldwide, occur in Africa.
A death every thirty seconds, is more than a MILLION deaths per year.
And it's not from something like cancer, which no one knows how to prevent or cure. It's from malaria... a disease that has been all but eradicated in many parts of the world. It's spread by the Anopheles mosquito, which carries the germ, and infects a human when the mosquito bites him.
That mosquito has been all but eliminated in the United States and most other modern countries. Thorough spraying with the insecticide DDT has effectively eliminated the threat of malaria in all those countries. Various environmental whackos tried to stop it, naturally, predicting disasters of various magnitudes, but none of their predictions ever came true (this is always the outcome of the whackos' predictions).
But now we find that DDT has been banned, when countries like Africa have people dying by the millions from a disease that DDT could control! And why? Because of fears that a few birds might be harmed! And not even the birds, really - the whackos are worried that the shells of their egg might be the wrong thickness, and a greater percentage of baby birds die than ordinarily do.
Let me get this straight.
These people think that millions of people dying, men women and children, is not too great a price to pay for keeping birds' egg shells the right thickness???
I haven't studied this as much as I usually study things, and I have to believe I missed something that justifies the withholding of a known cure for malaria, with relatively mild side effects, from people who are literally dying for it.
Someone PLEASE tell me what I've left out here.
PLEASE.
Would you give us the link, please, to this article?
It doesn't cause allergies, breathing difficulties, cancer, hives, acne, or anythinng else in humans. Some whacko wrote a book in the 60s hinting that it did, but without citing any evidence. Since then, none of the claims were found true. With the massive use of DDT before then, in the US and other countries, you'd think they would have noticed something, if there were anything to notice.
It does affect the eggshells of some birds. It also saves millions of human lives - lives that are being lost today. What kind of warped mentality bans it in that environment?
"Some whacko wrote a book in the '60s".......you wouldn't be referring to Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, would you? "Some whacko"??? Why do I get the impression that you've never read that book?
"When the book Silent Spring was published, Rachel Carson was already a well-known writer on natural history, but had not previously been a social critic. The book was widely read—especially after its selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the New York Times best-seller list—and inspired widespread public concerns with pesticides and pollution of the environment. Silent Spring facilitated the ban of the pesticide DDT[2] in 1972 in the United States.
By tradition and by Carson's own public assertions, the impetus for Silent Spring was ostensibly a letter written in January 1958[6] by Carson's friend, Olga Owens Huckins,[7] to The Boston Herald, describing the death of numerous birds around her property resulting from the aerial spraying of DDT to kill mosquitoes, a copy of which Huckins sent to Carson.[8] Carson's response to the letter, so her publicity stated, was to then turn her attention to environmental problems caused by chemical pesticides.[9][10]
In fact, Carson had become concerned about the effect of pesticides, DDT particularly, as early as the 1940s, when anti-pest campaigns had been part of the Pacific war effort. She had already begun collecting research on the matter and calling others' attention to it when a 1957 lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture regarding aerial spraying over Long Island caught her attention and mobilized her to embark on the project that would eventually become Silent Spring.[
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Why do I get the impression that you've never read that book?
