[Dean's World] Aziz P: Smearing Rachel Carson with genocide

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Posted by Aziz P:
Smearing Rachel Carson with genocide
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1183470777.shtml


   [1]at RedState, where else?

     Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, and Rachel
     Carson: Legacies of Mass Genocide

   Genocide? Rachel Carson woke up one morning, thought, there are way
   too many sons of Cain in the Dark Continent, let's see if we can scrub
   it some... and voila a plan was born?

   Unreal. And yes this is a Recommended Blog at RedState... par for the
   course.

   As always, those with the patience for reading the actual history of
   events will find that the reason that millions died from malaria in
   Africa was due to a number of reasons, [2]none involving Rachel
   Carson. Rather, more due to lack of public health infrastructure,
   exploding population growth, and increasing resistance to DDT and
   other insecticides:

     Overseas, DDT was being phased out of the fight against malaria,
     but Carson and budding environmentalists were not the reason. In
     the 1950s, when the Global Malaria Eradication Program was
     launched, the U.S. had been a major financier of it. But as the
     years ticked by, eradication remained a distant dream, says
     Litsios, the retired World Health Organization scientist. (His
     book, "The Tomorrow of Malaria," was published in 1996.) He
     explains that the global program "oversold the possibility of
     eradication" and Congress tired of its promises. By the early '60s,
     the money Congress had pledged to the program dried up. In 1969,
     the WHO officially abandoned the eradication effort.

     During that period, the fight against malaria in Africa never
     picked up steam. Robert Snow, head of the malaria group at the
     Wellcome Trust/Kenya Medical Research Institute in Nairobi, has
     done considerable research and number crunching in an attempt to
     quantify the true burden of malaria in Africa over the last
     century. In an article published in 2001, in Trends in
     Parasitology, he wrote, "Despite the successes of the WHO
     eradication campaign in many parts of the world following the
     Second World War, most of Africa was regarded as a lost cause, and
     in practice the eradication of malaria in Africa was never
     attempted."

     In the 1960s and 1970s, colonialism in Africa was ending and
     several countries were undergoing major changes. "Many African
     countries realized they couldn't really expect to progress with
     malaria at all if they didn't have some kind of infrastructure,"
     says Litsios. The WHO couldn't afford to launch a massive
     insecticide-spraying program and help countries build up basic
     health services at the same time. It chose the latter, Litsios
     says.

     Better public health services helped improve childhood mortality in
     Africa, but malaria programs faltered. Malaria is a complex disease
     caused by a parasite with a complicated life cycle. "For malaria
     control, you need to have a really good understanding of
     mosquitoes, the malaria parasite and human behavior," says Richard
     Tren, chairman of the board of Africa Fighting Malaria, an advocacy
     group that has lobbied for increased use of DDT. In the '70s, many
     health programs were ill-equipped to handle that complexity.

   The [3]Salon article also makes the point worth repeating that,
   despite all these obstacles, "malaria was responsible for 18 percent
   of deaths in Africa before 1960 and 12 percent of deaths between 1960
   and 1989. In other words, deaths from malaria decreased during the
   period that treatment shifted from insecticides to medicine."

References

   1. http://redstate.com/blogs/advocate123/2007/jul/02/joseph_stalin_mao_zedong_adolf_hitler_pol_pot_and_rachel_carson_legacies_of_mass_genocide
   2. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/06/29/rachel_carson/index1.html
   3. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/06/29/rachel_carson/index1.html