<$BlogRSDURL$>
Tram Town
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
 
Category: DDT
Just in from the New York Times... It's Time to Spray DDT (requires a login, you might like to register or just head on over to bugmenot).
The article is mainly about how we should be using DDT to suppress mosquitoes in households thus reducing the millions of tragic deaths due to malaria the world over. Very laudable aims. Buried deep in the text is the following:
I called the World Wildlife Fund, thinking I would get a fight. But Richard Liroff, its expert on toxins, said he could accept the use of DDT when necessary in anti-malaria programs.
"South Africa was right to use DDT," he said. "If the alternatives to DDT aren't working, as they weren't in South Africa, geez, you've got to use it. In South Africa it prevented tens of thousands of malaria cases and saved lots of lives."
At Greenpeace, Rick Hind noted reasons to be wary of DDT, but added: "If there's nothing else and it's going to save lives, we're all for it. Nobody's dogmatic about it."
That's very good news but Greenpeace claiming lack of dogmatism over the DDT issue is a bit bloody rich, isn't it?
DDT is classified, rightly or wrongly, as a POP. Greenpeace has many times in the past called for no POP production at all:
"There are no safe levels of exposure to POPs. So we call for a cessation of their production."
Of course, we shouldn't be waiting for the nod from the likes of the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace before using this extremely useful and life-saving chemical but at least with these admissions the People Hating Green™ nuts in the Main Stream Media™ have one less support beam in their house of cards.
Thanks to JunkScience for the tipoff.

- posted by Semi @ 8:58 AM 0 comments

Powered by Blogger