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RP Members check out this story! Did you know or where you aware of this?
The Truth About DDT and Silent Spring
Robert Zubrin
We have discovered many preventives against tropical diseases, and often against the onslaught of insects of all kinds, from lice to mosquitoes and back again. The excellent DDT powder which had been fully experimented with and found to yield astonishing results will henceforth be used on a great scale by the British forces in Burma and by the American and Australian forces in the Pacific and India in all theatres.
—Winston Churchill, September 24, 1944
My own doubts came when DDT was introduced for civilian use. In Guyana, within two years it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time the birth rate had doubled. So my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.
—Alexander King, cofounder of the Club of Rome, 1990
In the last days of September 1943, as the U.S. Army advanced to the rescue of Italian partisans — some as young as nine — battling the Germans in the streets of Naples, the enraged Nazis, in a criminal act of revenge against their erstwhile allies, deployed sappers to systematically destroy the city’s aqueducts, reservoirs, and sewer system. This done, the supermen, pausing only to burn irreplaceable libraries, including hundreds of thousands of volumes and artifacts at the University of Naples — where Thomas Aquinas once taught — showed their youthful Neapolitan opponents their backs, and on October 1, to the delirious cheers of the Naples populace, Allied forces entered the town in triumph.
But a city of over a million people had been left without sanitation, and within weeks, as the Germans had intended, epidemics broke out. By November, thousands of Neapolitans were infected with typhus, with one in four of those contracting it dying of the lice-transmitted disease. The dead were so numerous that, as in the dark time of the Black Death, bodies were put out into the street by the hundreds to be hauled away by carts. Alarmed, General Eisenhower contacted Washington and made a desperate plea for help to contain the disaster.
Fortunately, the brass had a new secret weapon ready just in time to deal with the emergency. It was called DDT, a pesticide of unprecedented effectiveness. First synthesized by a graduate student in 1874, DDT went unnoticed until its potential application as an insecticide was discovered by chemist Paul H. Müller while working for the Swiss company Geigy during the late 1930s. Acquainted with Müller’s work, Victor Froelicher, Geigy’s New York representative, disclosed it to the American military’s Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in October 1942. Examining Müller’s data, the OSRD’s experts immediately realized its importance. On Guadalcanal, and elsewhere in the South Pacific, the Marines were losing more men to malaria than they were to the Japanese, with the entire 1st Marine Division rendered unfit for combat by the insect-borne disease. Without delay, first Geigy’s Cincinnati factory and then the giant DuPont chemical company were given contracts to produce the new pesticide in quantity.
Check out the rest of story
The Truth About DDT and Silent Spring
Robert Zubrin
We have discovered many preventives against tropical diseases, and often against the onslaught of insects of all kinds, from lice to mosquitoes and back again. The excellent DDT powder which had been fully experimented with and found to yield astonishing results will henceforth be used on a great scale by the British forces in Burma and by the American and Australian forces in the Pacific and India in all theatres.
—Winston Churchill, September 24, 1944
My own doubts came when DDT was introduced for civilian use. In Guyana, within two years it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time the birth rate had doubled. So my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.
—Alexander King, cofounder of the Club of Rome, 1990
In the last days of September 1943, as the U.S. Army advanced to the rescue of Italian partisans — some as young as nine — battling the Germans in the streets of Naples, the enraged Nazis, in a criminal act of revenge against their erstwhile allies, deployed sappers to systematically destroy the city’s aqueducts, reservoirs, and sewer system. This done, the supermen, pausing only to burn irreplaceable libraries, including hundreds of thousands of volumes and artifacts at the University of Naples — where Thomas Aquinas once taught — showed their youthful Neapolitan opponents their backs, and on October 1, to the delirious cheers of the Naples populace, Allied forces entered the town in triumph.
But a city of over a million people had been left without sanitation, and within weeks, as the Germans had intended, epidemics broke out. By November, thousands of Neapolitans were infected with typhus, with one in four of those contracting it dying of the lice-transmitted disease. The dead were so numerous that, as in the dark time of the Black Death, bodies were put out into the street by the hundreds to be hauled away by carts. Alarmed, General Eisenhower contacted Washington and made a desperate plea for help to contain the disaster.
Fortunately, the brass had a new secret weapon ready just in time to deal with the emergency. It was called DDT, a pesticide of unprecedented effectiveness. First synthesized by a graduate student in 1874, DDT went unnoticed until its potential application as an insecticide was discovered by chemist Paul H. Müller while working for the Swiss company Geigy during the late 1930s. Acquainted with Müller’s work, Victor Froelicher, Geigy’s New York representative, disclosed it to the American military’s Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in October 1942. Examining Müller’s data, the OSRD’s experts immediately realized its importance. On Guadalcanal, and elsewhere in the South Pacific, the Marines were losing more men to malaria than they were to the Japanese, with the entire 1st Marine Division rendered unfit for combat by the insect-borne disease. Without delay, first Geigy’s Cincinnati factory and then the giant DuPont chemical company were given contracts to produce the new pesticide in quantity.
Check out the rest of story
The Truth About DDT and Silent Spring
Posted from thenewatlantis.com
WWII World War Two
Chemicals
Public Health
Military History
Posted 9 y ago
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When I was young growing up outside of Philadelphia we used to run behind the DDT spraying trucks in the heat of the summer because they created a breeze and their were no bugs in the cloud COL Mikel J. Burroughs.
DDT and similar anti vector drugs helped contain malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases in many areas of Africa, Asia and South America relatively cheaply until it was forbidden to use the chemicals.
For those who believe that people are the biggest problem on the planet cheap and efficient remedies like DDT pose a great threat because they allow people to be healthier in "third word" nations with reduced infant and childhood mortality rates.
DDT and similar anti vector drugs helped contain malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases in many areas of Africa, Asia and South America relatively cheaply until it was forbidden to use the chemicals.
For those who believe that people are the biggest problem on the planet cheap and efficient remedies like DDT pose a great threat because they allow people to be healthier in "third word" nations with reduced infant and childhood mortality rates.
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But, on the "bright" side it did cut down on the population by letting them die from diseases that could have been prevented. All for nothing.
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When "Climate Change" became "science" I thought of the campaign against DDT and the rise in disease and death that occurred when it was banned. I also thought of the pseudo-scientific argument leading to the ban on DDT when Los Angeles banned the use of plastic shopping bags. (No one has been able to locate and photograph that Texas-sized island of floating plastic flotsam, have they?) It's a wonder that they didn't give Academy Awards and Nobel Peace Prizes to those who led the campaign to ban DDT, isn't it?
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