Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Miguel did a post on DDT

Which led to upset and butthurt.  Which led to this:
Wonderful people, aren't they?  "If you're worried about malaria, pack up and move.  Whether you can or not.  If you can't move, better you die than we use the eeevillle DDT to save you and your kids."







5 comments:

Sigivald said...

The other worst part is that he's just making up the part about bioaccumulative hazard in humans.

DDT doesn't do that, with those effects, in any data we have.

Even the "acute" effects or the industrial level "I sprayed DDT on crops for years" effects were ... just mostly not that bad?

It might tend to cause a few cancers, but not very strongly, with lots of exposure.

It's much less dangerous than malaria.

Keith said...

even the Anti Malarial drugs are seriously nasty.

There's one that if people are even slightly susceptible to psychoses, it'll give them a psychotic episode.

There was a big claim against the British Diplomatic corps by a bunch of people who went deaf after being fed anti malarials at work.

I forget which drug it was that an ex of mine was taking in the rain forest in Equador, during the monsoon season. It made her too sick to work and gave her psoriasis, that lasted for about a year, and was really wierd, the patches were symetrical down both sides of her body, same places on each arm and each leg.

Even doxycyclin made me burn like hell in the sun, and I'm normally pretty resistant to sun burn.

Anonymous said...

Great idea. Move to where there isn't any water. That's the best place for humans to live.
/sarc

Toastrider said...

Right before sulfa drugs became popular, there was chloramphenicol, a relatively cheap and easy to make antibiotic that easily made typhoid fever its bitch. It's still made today in some backwaters of the world that can't get modern drugs.

The reason it's not used is because it's not really safe to use on newborns (although you might be able to surf the limit with controlled dosages), and one in 30,000-40,000 people has a reaction to it called 'aplastic anemia' which is Really Bad Shit.

But comparatively speaking, you only have a 1 in 4 chance of surviving typhoid fever untreated. Yeah, I'll take the odds of chloramphenicol maybe killing me over that any day of the week.

emdfl said...

Yeah, rachel carson(burning in hell) would have been margret sanger's "woman of the year", if carson had been alive back in the '30's.