IN A NURSING home where I once used to work during school holidays, there
lay a
barrel-chested man with a kind face and thick black hair. He was a Vietnam
War
veteran and had his own room, though he never seemed to have visitors. He
was
paralysed and I rarely did more than glimpse him through the door, except
when
called in to help with some gruesome task or other, such as a manual,
which
required a nurse with gloves to manually, or more accurately digitally,
extract
fecal matter from the poor man's backside.

He also had malaria - legacy of a Vietnamese mosquito - which would come
on him
periodically, soaking his sheets with sweat and causing him terrible
torments.
The door of his room remained closed on those days and the feverish
existence
inside seemed to be hell on earth.

I have been paranoid about mosquitoes ever since, and the debilitating,
often
lethal, diseases they carry.

The paranoia is not entirely irrational, even in Australia, far away from
the
malaria killing fields of the tropics. Mosquitoes, once brought to heel by
the
much-maligned pesticide DDT, are on the march.

Last month at a health conference in Darwin, researchers warned of a
regional
epidemic of such mosquito-borne diseases as malaria, Japanese encephalitis
and
dengue fever. They also warned that malaria in the Asia-Pacific
represented a
major impediment to economic growth with about 1.4 million people in the
region
exposed each year. While Australia was declared malaria-free in 1981, the
disease kills about one person a year and infects 800 to 1000.

But worldwide the mosquito death toll is staggering. The World Health
Organisation says malaria kills 1.2 million to 2.7 million people each
year,
most of them in Africa - mostly children and pregnant women - and causes
brain
damage to many more.

That is one dead child every 30 seconds. Only AIDS is a bigger killer of
Africans.

All those deaths are the reason Rachel Carson's seminal 1962 book Silent
Spring,
about the evils of pesticides, was last week voted among the most
dangerous
books of the past two centuries. Fifteen American scholars enlisted by
conservative magazine Human Events awarded Carson the honour along with
Karl
Marx and Adolf Hitler. Silent Spring, with its scary talk of cancer and
dead
fish and the mantra that man must not interfere with nature, launched the
modern
environmental movement. It also demonised DDT.

"We should seek not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides,"
wrote
Carson, "but to find instead a reasonable accommodation between the insect
hordes and ourselves."

Which is fine as long as it's not your child dying from a mozzie bite.

The US Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT in 1972, and the rest of
the
world followed suit. Tens of millions of people have died from malaria
since.
Almost overnight, what has been described as one of the greatest public
health
tools of the 20th century became one of its biggest bogymen.

It was only thanks to widespread spraying of DDT in the 1950s and 1960s
that
malaria was eliminated from all developed countries and controlled in
tropical
Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa. In 1970 the US National Academy
of
Sciences declared that, in scarcely 20 years, DDT had prevented 500
million
deaths. Advertisements of the time, which today seem preposterous,
extolled it
as a benefactor of all humanity, with slogans such as "DDT is good for
me-e-e".

But malaria's mounting death toll in the decades since is finally
prompting a
rethink on DDT. In the footnotes of his best-selling anti-green novel
State Of
Fear, Michael Crichton asserted that the ban on the pesticide "has killed
more
people than Hitler".

An article in Britain's Spectator magazine last month went further,
branding the
DDT ban as the worst crime of the 20th century, and blaming
environmentalist
extremists for the deaths of about 50 million people.

Five years ago, South Africa began spraying small amounts of the dreaded
pesticide on the inside walls of houses to arrest a malaria plague. Other
parts
of Africa are following, despite the reported disapproval of the UN, WHO
and
other agencies.

Another green-centric organisation, the European Union, even threatened
Uganda
this year with an export ban if it used DDT to restart a malaria control
program.

But even environmentalists from Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund,
while
not admitting any guilt, are doing U-turns on their opposition to DDT,
says The
New York Times, and are beginning to weigh the benefits (live humans)
against
the risks (dead fish).

Perhaps the pendulum has swung from the knee-jerk eco-hysteria of Silent
Spring
to a more realistic approach to sparing human suffering.

Millions dying so fish may live
Sydney Morning Herald ^ | June 19, 2005 | Miranda Devine


IN A NURSING home where I once used to work during school holidays,
there lay a barrel-chested man with a kind face and thick black hair. He
was a Vietnam War veteran and had his own room, though he never seemed
to have visitors. He was paralysed and I rarely did more than glimpse
him through the door, except when called in to help with some gruesome
task or other, such as a manual, which required a nurse with gloves to
manually, or more accurately digitally, extract fecal matter from the
poor man's backside.

He also had malaria - legacy of a Vietnamese mosquito - which would come
on him periodically, soaking his sheets with sweat and causing him
terrible torments. The door of his room remained closed on those days
and the feverish existence inside seemed to be hell on earth.

I have been paranoid about mosquitoes ever since, and the debilitating,
often lethal, diseases they carry.

The paranoia is not entirely irrational, even in Australia, far away
from the malaria killing fields of the tropics. Mosquitoes, once brought
to heel by the much-maligned pesticide DDT, are on the march.

Last month at a health conference in Darwin, researchers warned of a
regional epidemic of such mosquito-borne diseases as malaria, Japanese
encephalitis and dengue fever. They also warned that malaria in the
Asia-Pacific represented a major impediment to economic growth with
about 1.4 million people in the region exposed each year. While
Australia was declared malaria-free in 1981, the disease kills about one
person a year and infects 800 to 1000.

But worldwide the mosquito death toll is staggering. The World Health
Organisation says malaria kills 1.2 million to 2.7 million people each
year, most of them in Africa - mostly children and pregnant women - and
causes brain damage to many more.

That is one dead child every 30 seconds. Only AIDS is a bigger killer of
Africans.

All those deaths are the reason Rachel Carson's seminal 1962 book Silent
Spring, about the evils of pesticides, was last week voted among the
most dangerous books of the past two centuries. Fifteen American
scholars enlisted by conservative magazine Human Events awarded Carson
the honour along with Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. Silent Spring, with
its scary talk of cancer and dead fish and the mantra that man must not
interfere with nature, launched the modern environmental movement. It
also demonised DDT.

"We should seek not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides,"
wrote Carson, "but to find instead a reasonable accommodation between
the insect hordes and ourselves."

Which is fine as long as it's not your child dying from a mozzie bite.

The US Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT in 1972, and the rest
of the world followed suit. Tens of millions of people have died from
malaria since. Almost overnight, what has been described as one of the
greatest public health tools of the 20th century became one of its
biggest bogymen.

It was only thanks to widespread spraying of DDT in the 1950s and 1960s
that malaria was eliminated from all developed countries and controlled
in tropical Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa. In 1970 the US
National Academy of Sciences declared that, in scarcely 20 years, DDT
had prevented 500 million deaths. Advertisements of the time, which
today seem preposterous, extolled it as a benefactor of all humanity,
with slogans such as "DDT is good for me-e-e".

But malaria's mounting death toll in the decades since is finally
prompting a rethink on DDT. In the footnotes of his best-selling
anti-green novel State Of Fear, Michael Crichton asserted that the ban
on the pesticide "has killed more people than Hitler".

An article in Britain's Spectator magazine last month went further,
branding the DDT ban as the worst crime of the 20th century, and blaming
environmentalist extremists for the deaths of about 50 million people.

Five years ago, South Africa began spraying small amounts of the dreaded
pesticide on the inside walls of houses to arrest a malaria plague.
Other parts of Africa are following, despite the reported disapproval of
the UN, WHO and other agencies.

Another green-centric organisation, the European Union, even threatened
Uganda this year with an export ban if it used DDT to restart a malaria
control program.

But even environmentalists from Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund,
while not admitting any guilt, are doing U-turns on their opposition to
DDT, says The New York Times, and are beginning to weigh the benefits
(live humans) against the risks (dead fish).

Perhaps the pendulum has swung from the knee-jerk eco-hysteria of Silent
Spring to a more realistic approach to sparing human suffering.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1425875/posts

Millions dying so fish may live
Sydney Morning Herald ^ | June 19, 2005 | Miranda Devine


IN A NURSING home where I once used to work during school holidays, there lay a
barrel-chested man with a kind face and thick black hair. He was a Vietnam War
veteran and had his own room, though he never seemed to have visitors. He was
paralysed and I rarely did more than glimpse him through the door, except when
called in to help with some gruesome task or other, such as a manual, which
required a nurse with gloves to manually, or more accurately digitally, extract
fecal matter from the poor man's backside.

He also had malaria - legacy of a Vietnamese mosquito - which would come on him
periodically, soaking his sheets with sweat and causing him terrible torments.
The door of his room remained closed on those days and the feverish existence
inside seemed to be hell on earth.

I have been paranoid about mosquitoes ever since, and the debilitating, often
lethal, diseases they carry.

The paranoia is not entirely irrational, even in Australia, far away from the
malaria killing fields of the tropics. Mosquitoes, once brought to heel by the
much-maligned pesticide DDT, are on the march.

Last month at a health conference in Darwin, researchers warned of a regional
epidemic of such mosquito-borne diseases as malaria, Japanese encephalitis and
dengue fever. They also warned that malaria in the Asia-Pacific represented a
major impediment to economic growth with about 1.4 million people in the region
exposed each year. While Australia was declared malaria-free in 1981, the
disease kills about one person a year and infects 800 to 1000.

But worldwide the mosquito death toll is staggering. The World Health
Organisation says malaria kills 1.2 million to 2.7 million people each year,
most of them in Africa - mostly children and pregnant women - and causes brain
damage to many more.

That is one dead child every 30 seconds. Only AIDS is a bigger killer of
Africans.

All those deaths are the reason Rachel Carson's seminal 1962 book Silent Spring,
about the evils of pesticides, was last week voted among the most dangerous
books of the past two centuries. Fifteen American scholars enlisted by
conservative magazine Human Events awarded Carson the honour along with Karl
Marx and Adolf Hitler. Silent Spring, with its scary talk of cancer and dead
fish and the mantra that man must not interfere with nature, launched the modern
environmental movement. It also demonised DDT.

"We should seek not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides," wrote
Carson, "but to find instead a reasonable accommodation between the insect
hordes and ourselves."

Which is fine as long as it's not your child dying from a mozzie bite.

The US Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT in 1972, and the rest of the
world followed suit. Tens of millions of people have died from malaria since.
Almost overnight, what has been described as one of the greatest public health
tools of the 20th century became one of its biggest bogymen.

It was only thanks to widespread spraying of DDT in the 1950s and 1960s that
malaria was eliminated from all developed countries and controlled in tropical
Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa. In 1970 the US National Academy of
Sciences declared that, in scarcely 20 years, DDT had prevented 500 million
deaths. Advertisements of the time, which today seem preposterous, extolled it
as a benefactor of all humanity, with slogans such as "DDT is good for me-e-e".

But malaria's mounting death toll in the decades since is finally prompting a
rethink on DDT. In the footnotes of his best-selling anti-green novel State Of
Fear, Michael Crichton asserted that the ban on the pesticide "has killed more
people than Hitler".

An article in Britain's Spectator magazine last month went further, branding the
DDT ban as the worst crime of the 20th century, and blaming environmentalist
extremists for the deaths of about 50 million people.

Five years ago, South Africa began spraying small amounts of the dreaded
pesticide on the inside walls of houses to arrest a malaria plague. Other parts
of Africa are following, despite the reported disapproval of the UN, WHO and
other agencies.

Another green-centric organisation, the European Union, even threatened Uganda
this year with an export ban if it used DDT to restart a malaria control
program.

But even environmentalists from Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, while
not admitting any guilt, are doing U-turns on their opposition to DDT, says The
New York Times, and are beginning to weigh the benefits (live humans) against
the risks (dead fish).

Perhaps the pendulum has swung from the knee-jerk eco-hysteria of Silent Spring
to a more realistic approach to sparing human suffering.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1425875/posts


--
Kurt Nicklas
"Why isn't Fallwell(sic) dead anyway?"
---Milton F. Brewster (milt73@sonic.net)

Millions dying so fish may live
Sydney Morning Herald ^ | June 19, 2005 | Miranda Devine


IN A NURSING home where I once used to work during school holidays, there lay a
barrel-chested man with a kind face and thick black hair. He was a Vietnam War
veteran and had his own room, though he never seemed to have visitors. He was
paralysed and I rarely did more than glimpse him through the door, except when
called in to help with some gruesome task or other, such as a manual, which
required a nurse with gloves to manually, or more accurately digitally, extract
fecal matter from the poor man's backside.

He also had malaria - legacy of a Vietnamese mosquito - which would come on him
periodically, soaking his sheets with sweat and causing him terrible torments.
The door of his room remained closed on those days and the feverish existence
inside seemed to be hell on earth.

I have been paranoid about mosquitoes ever since, and the debilitating, often
lethal, diseases they carry.

The paranoia is not entirely irrational, even in Australia, far away from the
malaria killing fields of the tropics. Mosquitoes, once brought to heel by the
much-maligned pesticide DDT, are on the march.

Last month at a health conference in Darwin, researchers warned of a regional
epidemic of such mosquito-borne diseases as malaria, Japanese encephalitis and
dengue fever. They also warned that malaria in the Asia-Pacific represented a
major impediment to economic growth with about 1.4 million people in the region
exposed each year. While Australia was declared malaria-free in 1981, the
disease kills about one person a year and infects 800 to 1000.

But worldwide the mosquito death toll is staggering. The World Health
Organisation says malaria kills 1.2 million to 2.7 million people each year,
most of them in Africa - mostly children and pregnant women - and causes brain
damage to many more.

That is one dead child every 30 seconds. Only AIDS is a bigger killer of
Africans.

All those deaths are the reason Rachel Carson's seminal 1962 book Silent Spring,
about the evils of pesticides, was last week voted among the most dangerous
books of the past two centuries. Fifteen American scholars enlisted by
conservative magazine Human Events awarded Carson the honour along with Karl
Marx and Adolf Hitler. Silent Spring, with its scary talk of cancer and dead
fish and the mantra that man must not interfere with nature, launched the modern
environmental movement. It also demonised DDT.

"We should seek not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides," wrote
Carson, "but to find instead a reasonable accommodation between the insect
hordes and ourselves."

Which is fine as long as it's not your child dying from a mozzie bite.

The US Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT in 1972, and the rest of the
world followed suit. Tens of millions of people have died from malaria since.
Almost overnight, what has been described as one of the greatest public health
tools of the 20th century became one of its biggest bogymen.

It was only thanks to widespread spraying of DDT in the 1950s and 1960s that
malaria was eliminated from all developed countries and controlled in tropical
Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa. In 1970 the US National Academy of
Sciences declared that, in scarcely 20 years, DDT had prevented 500 million
deaths. Advertisements of the time, which today seem preposterous, extolled it
as a benefactor of all humanity, with slogans such as "DDT is good for me-e-e".

But malaria's mounting death toll in the decades since is finally prompting a
rethink on DDT. In the footnotes of his best-selling anti-green novel State Of
Fear, Michael Crichton asserted that the ban on the pesticide "has killed more
people than Hitler".

An article in Britain's Spectator magazine last month went further, branding the
DDT ban as the worst crime of the 20th century, and blaming environmentalist
extremists for the deaths of about 50 million people.

Five years ago, South Africa began spraying small amounts of the dreaded
pesticide on the inside walls of houses to arrest a malaria plague. Other parts
of Africa are following, despite the reported disapproval of the UN, WHO and
other agencies.

Another green-centric organisation, the European Union, even threatened Uganda
this year with an export ban if it used DDT to restart a malaria control
program.

But even environmentalists from Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, while
not admitting any guilt, are doing U-turns on their opposition to DDT, says The
New York Times, and are beginning to weigh the benefits (live humans) against
the risks (dead fish).

Perhaps the pendulum has swung from the knee-jerk eco-hysteria of Silent Spring
to a more realistic approach to sparing human suffering.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1425875/posts

Millions dying so fish may live