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Comment by joecool1029 | Hacker News Reader

Time to bring back DDT. It was banned for misinformed reasons without any evidence to show that accumulation contributed to cancer or anything else nasty in mammals.[1] Neonics are reported to be 5,000-10,000 more toxic to bees. [2]

A 5 minute walk in fields around me will lead to at least 3 ticks latching on. We're now facing the Lone Star tick that causes a life threatening meat allergy (wtf) and Lyme's disease. I've also personally reported one of the first cases of West Nile virus in this state from a found dead bird. Now there's Zika, which seems great for humans. Oh and we can't forget the re-proliferation of bed bugs as well. But yeah, we should keep trusting the newer classes of pesticides that don't work as well and haven't been studied as thoroughly.

[1]https://junkscience.com/1999/07/100-things-you-should-know-a...

[2]http://www.tfsp.info/findings/harm/

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Bed bugs are practically immune to DDT. I looked into this a few years ago because DDT seemed like a perfect fit for the problem. (Mattresses are indoors, easy to saturate and used for more than a decade.) Turns out the LD50 for DDT is like 100000 ppm.‡ Think about that. Ten. Percent. Of their body weight.

(IMHO, DDT should be allowed for mosquito nets, as long as they are only used indoors and people know to incinerate the old nets instead of throwing them out. It is so darn effective and we were so boneheaded stupid the first time around.)

‡ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed_bug_control_techniques#Pes...

> Bed bugs are practically immune to DDT. I looked into this a few years ago because DDT seemed like a perfect fit for the problem. (Mattresses are indoors, easy to saturate and used for more than a decade.) Turns out the LD50 for DDT is like 100000 ppm.‡ Think about that. Ten. Percent. Of their body weight.

Ugh, noted. Thanks for the correction. I am aware of some resistance among specific mosquito species as well, but the residual repellant effect still makes it crazy useful for application on screens, nets, and tents.

Kept re-reading the first part of your post to make sure the LD50 wasn't 100% - literally drowning them. 10% is better but that's an alarming dose requirement.

The source you link to has its own agenda: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/JunkScience.com

Who cares? We all have our own agendas. It's a well-sourced page and hence why I linked it.

If you don't believe me about agendas, see other HN discussions regarding bike helmets, software patents, and housing.

Having an agenda doesn't mean it's immediately untrue, but it's worth being more skeptical. Are the sources picked because they support the agenda, and are the sources faithfully represented? A desire to see a particular outcome can skew these, and you should be more cautious compared to someone more independent.

DDT was brutal on the bird population. My father worked with state DNR to bring back the Bald Eagle population after DDT decimated it due to the soft eggshells it caused.

So basically we (as humanity) have three choices:

1) use neonicotinoid pesticides and killing off the bees

2) use DDT and kill off birds + danger to mammals

3) revert back to more traditional agriculture, and risk not being able to feed people

Basically, we're choosing between different evils :/

Presently we produce something like 5500 kcal per person on earth. Much of it to feed animals. Producing enough nutrition is not the issue - distribution and patterns of consumption are (and these are more political barriers than physical ones).

We could also scale back our agriculture by reducing our dependence on animal products. There are a number of mass produced crops that go in large part to feed animals that we then turn into food at a net energy loss. But in general, we'd rather paint ourselves into this corner than eat our vegetables.

>2) use DDT and kill off birds + danger to mammals

No danger to mammals, kill some birds (the hawk/eagle shell thinning was a lie[1], does kill some songbirds in high doses but I guess so does Teflon stoves), kills far less helpful insects.

It's the only one out of the three options where you don't risk killing hundreds of millions of people with disease and/or famine.

[1]http://www.jpands.org/vol9no3/edwards.pdf

The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons has also published articles claiming that HIV does not cause AIDS, that global warming is not human-caused and is beneficial anyway, that abortion causes breast cancer, and that vaccines cause autism. It is published by a far-right advocacy group and is neither a credible nor neutral source.

Yeah, other than the fact that the raptor population bounced back after DDT use was curtailed.

The issue has been pretty extensively studied and while you can cherry-pick individual studies the broad consensus is that DDT was one of the contributing factors.

>Yeah, other than the fact that the raptor population bounced back after DDT use was curtailed.

The raptor population was bouncing back right as we started to introduce DDT. It's a funny thing that happens when you stop incentivizing shooting of the birds (wasn't until the early 40's they got federal protection, and it takes time for populations to recover). If you'd have read the sources I've linked (and the any of the citations in those sources) you'd see you're wrong.

'But my father', anecdotes are nice when they come along with data. Stringing together multiple studies is the best way to disprove an established narrative... but unfortunately the amount of time it takes to disprove well applied bullshit greatly outweighs the time it took to apply it.

EDIT: Also while I'm at it. Ever think to consider that thin shells might have been caused by greatly increased mercury and lead levels of the time? We banned TEL and reduced coal consumption since then. Look at nearly every study that concluded DDT had to be to blame for thin shells and you'll find they noted increased lead, mercury, and aluminum levels along with... but never put it into their conclusion.

There's enough humans walking around and 200,000 new ones are being added to the pool every day.

It's not really a choice.

> There's enough humans walking around

There's an awful lot of debatable thinking hidden in those 5 words.

You think we need to increase the human population of Earth?

I doubt andybak does. But as soon as you get into the ways you stop 'them' breeding you end up in a very dark place.

That is true and andybak is correct. I have been thinking more and more about this and the mind certainly wanders to dark places.

On the other hand, it is a problem that keeps getting bigger.

It feels a bit like the elephant in the room. Either because of the aforementioned "solutions" that come up initially[1] or because "science will fix it" since it has been shown that once people have it well they stop having a lot of kids.

Still, every five days there's 1 million more people on this earth and it doesn't look like most of these people will have it good in the near future. And meanwhile everything else just has to make room for more of us. It just doesn't seem sustainable.

[1] And who am I to stop people from having kids? I've got two myself.

You know we've passed "peak child", right?

The only thing that's still causing the population to increase is the inconvenient decrease in untimely death.

I find that more convenient than inconvenient.

> revert back to more traditional agriculture, and risk not being able to feed people

Given that the average American watches TV for something like 8 hours per day, I'd say there's roughly zero risk of not being able to feed people.

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