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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Taro who wrote (956568)	8/14/2016 6:37:31 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573092

Sure, DDT is safe for adult humans and likely most adult mammals. No one has claimed differently. For non-mammals, feti and growing children, not so much. DDE has been implicated in problems with neurological development in young humans. Let's clarify something for a moment. In most cases, it isn't DDT itself that causes the problems. DDE and some of the other products of degradation and metabolism do. And that can wreak havoc, as was shown in the past. It is especially bad on raptoral birds, although some others can be affected. In Louisiana, DDT use drove brown pelicans into extinction. They had to be re-introduced into Louisiana from other areas. As has been pointed out ad nauseum, the reason why malaria has not been eradicated in some countries is because of over-use of DDT, not under-use. It has been banned for agricultural use because heavy use, like for pest control, causes populations of mosquitoes in particular to become resistant to it. And the resistant mosquitoes are much, much more difficult to control. It has never been banned for vector control anywhere but in some developed countries. Which have more options for vector control. It is very effective, and very, very legal, to use it on walls in houses and mosquito nets. And it doesn't run the risk of the mosquitoes developing immunity. I grew up on the Texas Gulf Coast. Which, like any tropical or sub-tropical environment with swamps and marshes and commensurate heavy rainfall, has a lot of mosquitoes. Like turning your clothing and exposed skin black, lots of mosquitoes. And historically, a lot of mosquito-born diseases. I grew up with a familiarity of mosquito control, but before and after the DDT ban. Personal experience, you know. Something you lack. I remember riding on bikes with the other kids as the mosquito control trucks fogged out neighborhoods. Without DDT by then. They used malathion. Like they do today, but not by those trucks. They use airplanes and only when they detect things like West Nile. Mosquito-born illnesses still occur, but they are rare and, once detected, brought to a halt because of spraying. A big problem is that the Republican dominated Congress has cut funding by more than 80% of the programs that trap and test mosquitoes for diseases. So the only way we know there is a problem, like with Zika now, is when people start getting sick. So diseases can get a foothold in the population before we know they are in the area. That is what happened in Miami, for example. And it does make us vulnerable to epidemics because there is no way to detect a growing area of infection until it happens. So if Zika ever spreads to more than a tiny number of cases in the US, it is because Republicans have crippled our warning system and not because DDT isn't used.