At 08:52 AM 19/02/2002 +1100, lorna bloom wrote:
What is the latest thinking of the use of DDT?
I have been in correspondence with someone living in Africa, who says people
over reacted to this pesticide and that it's a crime it has been banned. He
reckons it should be reintroduced to third world countries.
Here are some of his arguments:
The pesticide essentially wiped out malaria in America and Europe.
Isn't that statement equivalent to saying that DDT eradicated the Anopheles
mosquito in America and Europe?
From the History of Malaria site at
http://www.museums.org.za/bio/apicomplexa/history_of_malaria.htm:
"1940s: Large-scale spraying with DDT of breeding areas in the US but
probably contributed little to the final disappearance of malaria because
competent vectors still remain. There are still occasional outbreaks of
malaria in the US, associated with infected people coming back from malaria
areas."
I'll bet malaria was in long term decline in the North before the
introduction of DDT and I wonder if there are any numbers to imply DDT made
any significant impact on the trend.
Have a look at http://www.malaria.org/teachingmodules/ddt.html for a Flash
presentation that makes the case for DDT.
Then see http://whyfiles.org/016skeeter/kill.html for another perspective.
This article mentions that mosquitoes build up resistance to DDT so it is
of limited use on its own.
There's a lot of material on this controversial topic on the Web. If
anyone's interested, try searching Google (www.google.com) for words like
malaria, DDT, eradicate, history, Europe and US.
Cheers
Paul Foxworthy
---- Coherent Software ------------- http://www.cohsoft.com.au/ ----
For interactive Web sites, databases, software, animation
Aust. Family History Compendium at http://www.cohsoft.com.au/afhc/
Birding-Aus is on the Web at
www.shc.melb.catholic.edu.au/home/birding/index.html
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message
"unsubscribe birding-aus" (no quotes, no Subject line)
to
|
