I sent the following in a personal e-mail to Lorna but in the light of the
discussion, I am now posting it on Birding-aus.
I lived in the Solomon Islands for several years in the 1970's. DDT was
sprayed onto the inside walls of houses to kill mosquitos. If you had young
children who were at the crawling and licking age, you were supposed to
inform the sprayers so they would miss your house. This was fine if you
knew about it. The trouble was that the ex-pats were told and so were the
educated Solomon Islanders but the majority of the population were ignorant
of this fact. The authorities certainly felt there was a danger to humans.
The other point is that the mosquitos in most areas of PNG and the Solomons
built up a resistance to DDT and "super" mosquitos were carrying malaria.
The figures for malaria were on the increase in those areas. Surely the
same thing could happen elsewhere? I would suspect that the only reason it
did not happen (or be found to have happened) is that the use of DDT was
stopped early enough.
I can vouch for the death of fauna. All our houses were full of geckos
which helped keep the mosquitos under control. For up to six months after
spraying,there were no geckos (or spiders) but LOTS of mosquitos.
Terry Pacey
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