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Comment by zer00eyz | Hacker News Reader

See DDT was bad for birds, but in a very short time frame we got rid of malaria in the United States.

https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...

And we put down so much DDT that people around my age never had to deal with bed bugs till now.

I'm not advocating for spraying DDT again, I am suggesting that the history and use of DDT far more interesting than can be covered in a string of HN comments!

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Indeed, the issue of DDT is much much more nuanced than people make it out to be. At the time, it was a miracle chemical that was going to let us eradicate (rather than simply control or minimize) all manner of diseases, so the scale at which it was used was pretty incredible. In some cases we were effectively carpet-bombing whole islands with the stuff. No wonder we were killing birds and fish.

There's a book [1] about the history of DDT that does a great job of establishing a historical context for its use. I agree that we can't simply un-ban it, but our approach to disease prevention/control has come such a long way since prohibiting it that I can't help but wonder if we could deploy it safely now.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/DDT-American-Century-Environmental-En...

And people also seem to have forgotten about yellow fever. A nasty mosquito bourne disease that regularly killed tens of thousands in the Southern US. DDT also eliminated it along with malaria.

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