Swickard: Mosquitoes like the DDT ban

© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." Voltaire
             The newest scare for Americans is a virus just making its way into our country named Zika. It is related to West Nile virus which we already are battling. The problem is we Americans have a cure for mosquitoes but for political reasons we will not use it.
            The way to deal with this epidemic is to kill all of the mosquitoes who spread the disease. While it seems hard to kill all of the mosquitoes, we have almost done it once before but politics gave the mosquitoes a chance to come back fully and kill millions upon millions of people.
            Several years ago two researchers had an article in Forbes, "Rachel Carson's Deadly Fantasies." This was published September 5, 2012. Dr. Henry Miller and Gregory Conko wrote that Rachel Carson's book, "Silent Spring" led to a worldwide ban on DDT use. Lacking DDT to kill mosquitoes is responsible for the loss of tens of millions of human lives, mostly children in poor tropical countries.
            They opine, "This remains one of the monumental human tragedies of the last century."
            The insecticide DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) was first discovered in 1874 and in 1939 a Swiss Chemist found it had great insecticidal properties. It was used in World War Two to control malaria and typhus. After the war the use of DDT expanded.
            The discovery of DDT's usefulness won the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine. Mosquitoes were controlled to the point that in just a decade they were seriously on the decline and therefore Malaria deaths were likewise on the decline.
            With no valid data DDT was banned and still is banned due to a political book by Rachel Carson in the 1960s. Malaria death returned and have stayed high. Mosquitoes have brought many other maladies of encephalitis and West Nile virus to the point that New Mexicans are injured or killed each year.
            It is a political campaign to keep DDT on the banned list when it has no known harm to humans and the presumed harm to raptors could not be replicated from Rachel Carson's book. Instead of telling people in New Mexico to put on mosquito repellent and to stay indoors, our government should kill every mosquito.
            Yes, the environmental lobby will not stand for it, but we could try. I have lost two friends to West Nile virus and have no patience for the environmental people who condemn our most fragile populations to death and diseases. If they, the environmentalists wish to die, so be it, but the great martyrs of our world did not send women and children into the wilderness instead of going themselves.
            Every death worldwide to malaria is an unnecessary death. Every death or illness from mosquito born viruses is not necessary. Millions are dying unnecessarily each year. Rachel Carson and her faulty research are responsible for millions of deaths.
            And we are responsible for those deaths because even by the early 1970s it was obvious to our scientists that the loss of DDT was far more harmful to human lives that we had realized before the ban. At that point there should have been an outpouring of information to reverse this ban. There wasn't because environmentalists are rabid about their agenda.
            In the 1950s, while I was living in Japan, early in the mornings the DDT truck would come down our street spraying the mosquitoes. We kids would often play in the mist to no harm other than ants refused to crawl on us for several days.
            Talking the truth gets people attacked because the environmentalists are political not scientific. If you join me in calling for the reintroduction of DDT all over New Mexico to protect our elderly and children you will be attacked. But the lives of our children are worth it.
            I'm all for setting up a Blue-Ribbon panel to investigate this controversy as long as politicians stay out of the way. They know nothing and only react to political causes. I always say to never use a political solution for a non-political problem.
            Mosquitoes are killing our citizens. There should be no politics as to the cure. It's DDT.

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