DDT Ban = Mass Death

Check out this interesting NY Times article.

Excerpts and comments follow.

This “Fable for Tomorrow,” as she called it, set the tone for the hodgepodge of science and junk science in the rest of the book.

This astute observation is what is wrong with many of the politically-motivated claims of environmentalism. Keep an active mind as opposed to an "open mind" on this (or any) topic.

Why weren’t all of the new poisons killing people? An important clue emerged in the 1980s when the biochemist Bruce Ames tested thousands of chemicals and found that natural compounds were as likely to be carcinogenic as synthetic ones. Dr. Ames found that 99.99 percent of the carcinogens in our diet were natural, which doesn’t mean that we are being poisoned by the natural pesticides in spinach and lettuce. We ingest most carcinogens, natural or synthetic, in such small quantities that they don’t hurt us. Dosage matters, not whether a chemical is natural, just as Dr. Baldwin realized.

Interesting. Food for thought, pardon the pun, when considering organic vs non-organic food.

The human costs have been horrific in the poor countries where malaria returned after DDT spraying was abandoned.

Echoing this critical point on mass death is this article which reports: "The environmentalists' ideological opposition to pesticides has no basis in science. It is a death sentence to millions."