World’s Scariest Words: ‘I’m an Environmentalist and I’m Here to Help’
Roy – if I wanted to equate public health measures to a communist plot I would bring up the old paranoia about fluoridation. But that brand of paranoia was generated by the extreme right, not the extreme left. Fears about vaccines are kind of a bipartisan form of paranoia, at the convergence point where both extremes meet and agree.
Boris – Kristof didn’t say that DDT was banned, he said that misguided environmentalists and government agencies opposed the use of DDT. If you don’t want to listen to Kristof, you can listen to the World Health Organization when they say:
“In the early 1960s, several developing countries had nearly wiped out malaria. After they stopped using DDT, malaria came raging back and other control methods have had only modest success.”
Those were the control methods that were recommended by fans of Rachel Carson, which is one of may reasons why she’s not a reliable reference
Arata Kochi, head of the WHO’s antimalaria campaign, has made the move to bring back DDT, for the same reason Kristof promotes DDT, to save millions of lives. His main opposition was from environmental groups. I have no idea why these environmental groups haven’t been sued yet.
