
How Rachel Carson Cost Millions of People Their Lives - dandare
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/02/04/how-rachel-carson-cost-millions-of-people-their-lives.html?via=twitter_page
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baron816
Retro Report actually covered this the other week:
[https://www.retroreport.org/video/malaria-and-the-silent-
spr...](https://www.retroreport.org/video/malaria-and-the-silent-spring/)

No Rachel Carson didn't cause the deaths of millions. Malaria carrying
mosquitos have become resistant to DDT, as she had predicted. She was
advocating for using a diverse range of tactics to solve the problem, instead
of one brute force approach.

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candiodari
Ok perhaps it should be put more accurately like this : millions of people
died at 5-20 years old that would have died at 50, maybe even 65 years old.

And the reverse is also true, if we hadn't outlawed DDT, when resistance
occurs, a number of people would have died (at age 50) without it actually
affording them protection. That number would have been smaller and of course
those people would have had a life before they died from DDT side effects and
complications.

The thing about outlawing DDT that's "surely not related" is that it protected
hundreds, maybe even thousands of western lives, and lives of the local very
rich (mostly politicians, UN diplomats, ...) at the cost of millions of black
children deaths, poor children.

And, of course, environmentalists are still at it. You see, the only way
you're ever going to protect against malaria in Africa is "vector control".
Eradicating the mosquitoes in other words. How ? Well, by purposefully
destroying their habitat. Anything that's a swamp, or swamp-like anywhere near
human populations (that's almost everywhere), we dump in sand until it doesn't
support that ecosystem anymore. Doing this is what's currently protecting tens
of millions of lives yearly, and apparently it's bad.

In the same manner, the (few) alternatives, like genetic modifications to
eradicate the mosquitoes by inserting "termination genes" into male
mosquitoes, are being fought by environmentalists as well.

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baron816
Please watch the video: [https://www.retroreport.org/video/malaria-and-the-
silent-spr...](https://www.retroreport.org/video/malaria-and-the-silent-
spring/)

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kkojei
This is ridiculously poor logic and the author should be ashamed to expose
this flawed reasoning as an example of presymed intelligence. Rachel Carson
did NOT cause ANY deaths because of her work. The cause of those deaths was
malaria. Malaria was killing people long before the advent of DDT. Centuries
before. That DDT was banned had to do with its own deadly flaws and nothing
else. To try and hang mass murder accusations in this gifted and courageous
woman is patently absurd.

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bhickey
I don't follow your reasoning.

People died before seat belts. We have seat belts and they save lives. I
publish a paper claiming that seat belts cause lung cancer. Seat belts are
withdrawn from cars and people die. If my research was bunk, haven't I just
killed a lot of people in the name of public health?

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Steko
_" the most striking feature of the claim against Carson is the ease with
which it can be refuted." DDT was never banned for anti-malarial use,[92] (its
ban for agricultural use in the United States in 1972 did not apply outside
the US or to anti-malaria spraying;[93] the international treaty that banned
most uses of DDT and other organochlorine pesticides—the 2001 Stockholm
Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants—included an exemption for DDT for
the use of malaria control until affordable substitutes could be found.)[86]
Mass outdoor spraying of DDT was abandoned in poor countries subject to
malaria, such as Sri Lanka, in the 1970s and 1980s, not because of government
prohibitions, but because the DDT had lost its ability to kill the mosquitoes_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson)

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drallison
Paul A. Offit, the author, is chief of the division of infectious diseases and
the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of
Philadelphia and a professor of vaccinology and pediatrics at the University
of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. One would think he'd know how to analyze
the trade-offs invoked with DDT. As kkojei points our, Offit's analysis (such
as it is) is just plain wrong.

DDT is effective against anopheles mosquitoes and so helped control malaria.
But that control came at a significant ecological cost. DDT is a fat soluble
estrogen and androgen mimic with significant long-term environmental impact on
fish, birds, and mammals. An honest evaluation of Rachel Carson's impact would
have tried to weigh the cost of saving lives from malaria against the cost of
destroying significant ecosystems and possibly pushing some species into
extinction.

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djmdjm
This article is bullshit. DDT was never widely banned for anti-Malaria use,
only for agriculture:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane#Restrictions_on_usage)

In fact, the restrictions on agricultural use substantially prolonged and
improved DDT value for Malaria control by reducing the rate at which
mosquitoes evolved resistance.

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candiodari
Given the net effects of the ban, it might as well have been that.

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hprotagonist
DDT is still in use, and WHO-approved for vector control (only).

As of ~2008, we (the US) still made quite a lot of it for the Indian market.

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emodendroket
I think I'm well and truly sick of the Slate Pitch at this point.

