\nWhile flogging this one around the track one more time, Miranda Devine takes a moment to muse on the attitudes that prevailed before the publication of Silent Spring:<\/em><\/p>\n
\nAdvertisements 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”.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Tim Lambert supplied a link<\/a> to an advertisement with that slogan. The same rendering has been widely reprinted.<\/a> The advertisement perfectly captures the cheerful carelessness that led to over a billion pounds of the stuff<\/a> in the US alone being applied to everything in sight. The singing cow and the dancing cucumber seemed about right … but … I did wonder how much the company paid whoever came up with the name “Killing Salt Chemicals,” and the reference to Star Trek seemed out of place. So I looked up the original (in Time<\/em> magazine of June 30, 1947) and compared it with the reprinted version. The linked-to version has been modified from the original, but not by much:
\n
\nThe blithe willingness to sprinkle DDT on everything from the barley to the baby, celebrated so colorfully in this advertisement, led in just a few years to widespread insecticide resistance among malaria-carrying mosquitoes. In Sri Lanka, Gordon Harrison observed[2]<\/sup> that <\/p>\n\nAnopheles culifacies,<\/em> completely susceptible to DDT when the spray stopped in 1964 was now [in 1968] found resistant presumably because of the use of DDT for crop protection in the interim. Within a couple of years, so many culifacies<\/em> survived that despite the spraying malaria spread in 1975 to more than 400,000 people.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This pattern was repeated in many places. If governments had paid more attention to Rachel Carson in the 1960s, this weapon against malaria might have retained its potency. <\/p>\n
[1]<\/sup>“But,” some will object, “didn’t some environmental groups want<\/i> to ban all use of DDT?” They sure did. And they got talked out of it. The simple fact is that DDT has never been banned as an antimalarial agent. <\/p>\n
[2]<\/sup>Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man,<\/em> Gordon Harrison, E. P. Dutton, 1978, p. 255<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thanks to John Quiggin and Tim Lambert, we have pointers to yet another uninformed anti-environmentalist loyally repeating the party line that DDT has been banned for use against malaria, and that the ban has cost millions of lives. This is a crock, as a quick visit to the Malaria Foundation will confirm.[1] While flogging this… Continue reading Mmm … DDT … Yum!<\/i><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somesnarksareboojums.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somesnarksareboojums.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somesnarksareboojums.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somesnarksareboojums.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somesnarksareboojums.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somesnarksareboojums.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somesnarksareboojums.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somesnarksareboojums.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somesnarksareboojums.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"DDT](\"http:\/\/www.someareboojums.org\/blog\/wp-content\/images\/ddt_is_good_for_me-e-e.jpeg\")