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Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

submitted by JesseoftheNorth

1 decade 4 years 7 months ago

Rachel Carson was a marine biologist for the US Bureau of Fisheries that first pointed out the dangerous effects of DDT and other synthetic pesticides on the environment and wildlife. Her best-selling book Silent Spring raised public awareness of the impacts man-made chemicals have on ecology and ultimately led to the banning of DDT and to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

4 Comments

*books *controversy

Adding video to channels (Books, Controversy) - requested by calvados.

Moving this video to JesseoftheNorth's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

While indiscriminate spraying of DDT is obviously stupid and dangerous, the rise in worldwide malaria rates in response to the restrictions on DDTs use have killed hundreds of thousands to millions of humans.

Now, unfortunately, it's too late. Like not using all of one's prescribed antibiotics, we allowed mosquitoes to develop a resistance to DDT when we stopped using it and it doesn't work anymore (at least not as well).

By the early 1960s we had malaria cases in India down to almost zero from 75 Million in 1947. Sri Lanka went from 2.8 million cases in 1946 to 17 cases in 1963. Malaria was on the verge of extinction in these places.

Then we lost DDT thanks to Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring". By 1976 there were 6.4 million cases in India. Today it sits between 2 and 3 million cases a year and India is one of the luckier ones. Throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa more than 50% of all children are infected. In Zambia, in 2005, there were 1353 cases for every 1000 children under 5 years old. That means a huge percent of the children are infected more than once a year.

Was DDT dangerous to spray indiscriminately? Absolutely. Was it saving millions of lives? Without a doubt.

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