Quote:
Originally Posted by Chips Ahoy
Not everyone, however, was happy about all of these achievements. One such person was Club of Rome co-founder Alexander King. In 1990 he expressed why:
“My own doubts came when DDT was introduced for civilian use. In Guyana, within two years it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time the birth rate doubled. So my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it greatly added to the population problem.”
Powerful counter-forces against the use of DDT can be traced to the birth of a new “environmental movement”. An early salvo of the attack on DDT came from Aldous Huxley, who became famous for his 1932 book, Brave New World. Huxley’s subsequent Brave New World Revisited (1958) warns that the danger to civilization posed by Third World overpopulation would lead to communist revolution, attacking DDT as an important contributor:
“We go to a tropical island…and with the aid of DDT we stamp out malaria, and in two or three years, save hundreds of thousands of lives.”
Bet these guys were very much for a women's oh so precious right to choose...with respect to abortions.
Can't find the quote of the Sierra Club president in the 70's saying that Malaria is nature's population control....and that that was why he was opposed to DDT
• The population of India in 1947 was 344 million, of which a mind-bending 21.8 percent was infected with malaria. Deaths reported that year topped 800,000. In 1965, outbreaks had dropped 99 percent and no deaths occurred. Today India has the world’s only high-capacity DDT production facility and continues to enjoy extremely low rates of insect-borne disease. (Interestingly, despite environmentalist claims that DDT is a human carcinogen, WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer reports total rates of cancer in India are less than half those in the United States.)
• In Zanzibar, DDT spraying commenced in 1958 when malaria plagued 70 percent of the population. Six years later, frequency had dropped to 5 percent. After the DDT ban, case prevalence rose to between 50 and 60 percent.
• Malaria cases in Venezuela numbered 817,115 in 1943 when DDT entered the scene, but health authorities reported only 800 in 1958.
• In the 1950s, annual malaria cases in Nepal totaled two million, with a 10 percent mortality rate. Life expectancy was only 28 years. By 1968, there were 2,468 cases, and life expectancy reached 42.3 years in 1970. Officials credited DDT alone.
• Peru had practically eradicated malaria using DDT, but since spraying was halted there in the 1980s, malaria is once again a major public health issue.
• A 1959 pilot study conducted in Uganda reported malaria case prevalence in a high-risk area of 22.7 percent dropping to just 0.5 percent in 10 months. In surrounding variable-risk areas the rate declined from 12.5 percent to zero.
• Taiwan reduced its number of cases from more than one million in 1945 to nine in 1969. Soon thereafter officials reported the disease eradicated from the island, and it remains so today.