DDT is safe: just ask the professor who ate it for 40 years
DDT was introduced as an insecticide during the 1940s. In Churchill's words: "The excellent DDT powder has been found to yield astonishing results against insects of all kinds, from lice to mosquitoes."
And astonishing they were. DDT was particularly effective against the anopheles mosquito, which is the carrier of malaria, and people once hoped that DDT would eradicate malaria worldwide. Consider Sri Lanka. In 1946, it had three million cases, but the introduction of DDT reduced the numbers, by 1964, to only 29. In India, the numbers of malaria cases fell from 75 million to around 50,000.
But, in 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the book that launched the environmental movement. In that book, Carson showed how DDT was imperilling wildlife, particularly predators at the top of the food chain that accumulated the chemical in their fat and in their thinning egg shells.
Within a decade, the developed countries had banned DDT, as did some developing countries, to the detriment of their health. In Sri Lanka, cases of malaria soon rose to 500,000. Worldwide, malaria has returned with a vengeance, accounting annually for 300 million cases and, sadly, one million deaths, mainly of children.
telegraph.co.uk
Another endorsement of DDT came from an expert in global health law, Georgetown University law professor Lawrence Gostin, who told STAT it should “absolutely” be used in the Zika outbreak and called the ban on DDT “a disaster” foisted on poor people in the southern hemisphere by “rich, privileged northerners.”
statnews.com
The researchers specifically evaluated risk of autism in relation to exposure to pyrethroids, yes, the same pesticide now being used to carpet bomb Zika-carrying mosquitos. The study shows that exposure of mothers to pyrethroids during the third trimester of pregnancy was associated with an 87% increased risk of autism for their child. - See more at: drperlmutter.com
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