How Rachel Carson Cost Millions of People Their Lives | Hacker News Reader

How Rachel Carson Cost Millions of People Their Lives

thedailybeast.com

13 pointsdandare12 comments

Retro Report actually covered this the other week: https://www.retroreport.org/video/malaria-and-the-silent-spr...

No Rachel Carson didn't cause the deaths of millions. Malaria carrying mosquitos have become resistant to DDT, as she had predicted. She was advocating for using a diverse range of tactics to solve the problem, instead of one brute force approach.

Ok perhaps it should be put more accurately like this : millions of people died at 5-20 years old that would have died at 50, maybe even 65 years old.

And the reverse is also true, if we hadn't outlawed DDT, when resistance occurs, a number of people would have died (at age 50) without it actually affording them protection. That number would have been smaller and of course those people would have had a life before they died from DDT side effects and complications.

The thing about outlawing DDT that's "surely not related" is that it protected hundreds, maybe even thousands of western lives, and lives of the local very rich (mostly politicians, UN diplomats, ...) at the cost of millions of black children deaths, poor children.

And, of course, environmentalists are still at it. You see, the only way you're ever going to protect against malaria in Africa is "vector control". Eradicating the mosquitoes in other words. How ? Well, by purposefully destroying their habitat. Anything that's a swamp, or swamp-like anywhere near human populations (that's almost everywhere), we dump in sand until it doesn't support that ecosystem anymore. Doing this is what's currently protecting tens of millions of lives yearly, and apparently it's bad.

In the same manner, the (few) alternatives, like genetic modifications to eradicate the mosquitoes by inserting "termination genes" into male mosquitoes, are being fought by environmentalists as well.

Please watch the video: https://www.retroreport.org/video/malaria-and-the-silent-spr...

This is ridiculously poor logic and the author should be ashamed to expose this flawed reasoning as an example of presymed intelligence. Rachel Carson did NOT cause ANY deaths because of her work. The cause of those deaths was malaria. Malaria was killing people long before the advent of DDT. Centuries before. That DDT was banned had to do with its own deadly flaws and nothing else. To try and hang mass murder accusations in this gifted and courageous woman is patently absurd.

I don't follow your reasoning.

People died before seat belts. We have seat belts and they save lives. I publish a paper claiming that seat belts cause lung cancer. Seat belts are withdrawn from cars and people die. If my research was bunk, haven't I just killed a lot of people in the name of public health?

If you publish drastic health claims without good evidence, you bear some of the burden of the result-- even if you never intended it! Similarly, you might directly blame Jenny McCarthy for the hundreds or thousands of children that have died because they or the children they came in contact with weren't vaccinated due to scaremongering information.

This is the classical moral argument of intentions vs results.

"the most striking feature of the claim against Carson is the ease with which it can be refuted." DDT was never banned for anti-malarial use,[92] (its ban for agricultural use in the United States in 1972 did not apply outside the US or to anti-malaria spraying;[93] the international treaty that banned most uses of DDT and other organochlorine pesticides—the 2001 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants—included an exemption for DDT for the use of malaria control until affordable substitutes could be found.)[86] Mass outdoor spraying of DDT was abandoned in poor countries subject to malaria, such as Sri Lanka, in the 1970s and 1980s, not because of government prohibitions, but because the DDT had lost its ability to kill the mosquitoes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson

Paul A. Offit, the author, is chief of the division of infectious diseases and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of vaccinology and pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. One would think he'd know how to analyze the trade-offs invoked with DDT. As kkojei points our, Offit's analysis (such as it is) is just plain wrong.

DDT is effective against anopheles mosquitoes and so helped control malaria. But that control came at a significant ecological cost. DDT is a fat soluble estrogen and androgen mimic with significant long-term environmental impact on fish, birds, and mammals. An honest evaluation of Rachel Carson's impact would have tried to weigh the cost of saving lives from malaria against the cost of destroying significant ecosystems and possibly pushing some species into extinction.

This article is bullshit. DDT was never widely banned for anti-Malaria use, only for agriculture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethan...

In fact, the restrictions on agricultural use substantially prolonged and improved DDT value for Malaria control by reducing the rate at which mosquitoes evolved resistance.

Given the net effects of the ban, it might as well have been that.

DDT is still in use, and WHO-approved for vector control (only).

As of ~2008, we (the US) still made quite a lot of it for the Indian market.

I think I'm well and truly sick of the Slate Pitch at this point.

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