This Aug. 8 USA Today article by Anita Manning reports that West Nile virus cases triple in one week.
The CDC officially confirms 164 illnesses, including four deaths, in 16 states, compared with 112 illnesses in four states at this time last year. Some states say they have more West Nile cases than have been recorded by the CDC. Not reflected in the official case count are three more deaths in Colorado, a second death in Alabama and Georgia's first human case, which would raise the CDC state total to 17.
There's a simple, inexpensive, effective answer to the threat of West Nile virus: DDT.
This The New York Times op-ed by Henry I. Miller, Is There A Place for DDT?, explains why.
Given the long-term ineffectiveness of other pesticides, DDT remains the best alternative to fighting mosquitoes and the West Nile virus. It's worth recalling that DDT worked before, eradicating malaria from the United States. It's worth recalling, too, that since DDT was widely banned, insect-borne diseases like malaria and dengue fever have been on the rise worldwide. The World Health Organization estimates that malaria kills about one million people annually, and that there are 300 million to 500 million new cases each year.
All those millions of deaths can be laid at the feet of enviornmentalists, who have actively and successfully lobbied against the use of DDT since the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962.
This FrontPageMagazine.com article by Lisa Makson, Rachel Carson's Ecological Genocide, provides a good historical overview of the bad science and politics behind the DDT ban.
[Carson's] coterie of admirers at the U.N. and environmental groups such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund and the Environmental Defense Fund have managed to bring malaria and typhus back to sub-Saharan Africa with a vengeance."This is like loading up seven Boeing 747 airliners each day, then deliberately crashing them into Mt. Kilimanjaro," said Dr. Wenceslaus Kilama, Malaria Foundation International Chairman.[...]
"The scientific literature does not contain even one peer-reviewed, independently replicated study linking DDT exposures to any adverse health outcome [in humans]," said Dr. Amir Attaran, who is with Harvard University's Center for International Development and is a former WHO expert on malaria who used to support the environmentalists' call for using alternatives to DDT.
Last year, Nicholas Provenzo, chairman of The Center for the Advancement of Capitalism, wrote an op-ed about the philosophy underlying this issue: West Nile Virus: The Environmentalist’s Epidemic.
In the face of the obvious anti-man actions of the environmentalists, it’s time the veneer that they are concerned about the health and welfare of human beings be removed once and for all. If the benefit to human beings is the standard by which we judge the value of a technology, there should be no law against the use of DDT and we should be left free to use our technology to better our lives. But before epidemics such as West Nile virus and malaria are eradicated, the epidemic of environmentalism must be eradicated first.This cartoon is from our book, Black & White World. Posted by Forkum at August 12, 2003 07:30 AM
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