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National Geographic Acknowledges Huge Loss of Life to Malaria and Need for DDT

Notes DDT ban following Rachel Carson's Silent Spring book "may have killed 20 million children"

By Steve Jalsevac

August 7, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - National Geographic (NG), a leading environmentalist, de-population supporting magazine, has published a major cover story by Michael Finkel on the extraordinarily deadly and complex malaria parasite. The July 2007 NG edition article discusses possible solutions to the disease but also uncharacteristically acknowledges a leading expert's contention that the international ban on DDT was a terrible mistake which may have cost many millions of lives, especially in poor African nations. Environmental ideologues have been quick to slam Finkel's article as being flawed and damaging to the their past success in convincing the world to ban the DDT pesticide.

The article, Malaria, Stopping a Global Killer, states, "This year malaria will strike up to a half billion people. At least a million will die, most of them under age five, the vast majority living in Africa. That's more than twice the annual toll a generation ago."

Finkel writes that Robert Gwadz, a malaria specialist at the US National Institutes of Health, says the worldwide ban on DDT that eventually followed the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which condemned use of the chemical, "may have killed 20 million children." The quote by Gwadz does not include the huge number of adults that have also died since "DDT become nearly impossible to procure" because "the chemical was outlawed by most of the world for agricultural use".

The deaths caused by malaria, however, are only the beginning of the problems caused by the disease. A far greater number of the continent's people are regularly afflicted by malaria, which often causes life-long disabilities and devastating effects on African economies. Gwadz tells NG that "It's possible that due to malaria, almost every child in Africa is in some way neurologically scarred".

NG relates that in the past there were massive numbers of malaria cases in the United States. "A million Union Army casualties in the U.S. Civil War are attributed to malaria." There were also millions of U.S. malaria cases in the 1930s, which led to the launching of an intensive antimalaria program. The Centers for Disease Control was founded in 1946, "specifically to combat malaria". By 1950, reports National Geographic's Finkel, "transmission of malaria was halted in the U.S."

Finkel reports that prosperous nations such as the U.S. have been able to eradicate malaria, but "In the meantime, several distinctly unprosperous regions have reached the brink of total malarial collapse." The author presents his own analysis of why this has happened. He does not, however, address the argument presented in past LifeSiteNews articles, that racist western depopulation policies were likely a large factor in the withholding of desperately needed, inexpensive life-saving measures such as DDT from high birthrate African nations.

Internationally prominent author Michael Crichton, who, while having a severe anti-religious bias, nevertheless excels in the area of thoroughly researched fictional novels on scientific issues, presented a more directly condemning view of the Rachel Carson inspired DDT ban in a speech he gave in Sept. 2003. 

In this speech, Environmentalism as a Religion, Crichton stated:

"I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn't carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn."

See the complete National Geographic article at http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0707/feature1/index.html

See previous LifeSiteNews and other reports on the malaria issue: 

Green Hands Dipped In Blood: The DDT Genocide
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/aug/050816a.html

Finally an End to Massive Genocide Caused by Environmental Extremists' DDT Ban http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/sep/06092709.html

Call for DDT Opponents to be Held Accountable for Millions of Preventable Malaria Deaths
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/sep/060927a.html

50-80 Million Deaths Blamed On Environmental Extremists' DDT Ban
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/aug/05081601.html

U.N. TREATY RESTRICTIONS CRIPPLE FIGHT AGAINST MALARIA
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2001/jun/01061301.html

Tierney Takes on Rachel Carson and 'Silent Spring' DDT Ban
http://newsbusters.org/node/13269

Give Us DDT
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB118160970924631993-lMyQjAxMDE3ODExMjYxMDI5...;

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