July 12, 2023 By Joe Alton, M.D.
What's the deadliest animal in the world? A tiger? A great white shark? A poisonous snake? Nope. The most dangerous animal on Earth weighs about 2/1000 of a gram, is smaller than an M&M, and could be knocked silly by a raindrop. It's the mosquito.
Mosquitoes, obviously, can't eat you the way a shark or tiger could. They act as "vectors" for a number of diseases, one of which is malaria. When a mosquito of the species Anopheles bites you, it extracts blood as a meal and leaves some of its saliva. The saliva harbors any of a number of disease-causing organisms. In the case of malaria, it's a single-celled parasite in the genus Plasmodium. There were over 240 million cases of the disease (with 627,000 deaths) in 2020, almost all from mosquito bites.........To Read More....
My Take -As most of my readers know I owned a structural pest control company, and was heavily involved with my industry's affairs. Many years ago I attended our National associations annual Legislative Day and listened to a lot of clabber from a panel of government experts from the EPA, the Dept. of Health, and some other agency about bed bug control, which was scourging the nation. I got up and stated that the answer in 1946 was effective, inexpensive, readily available, easy to use chemistry, and if that's not the answer now there will be no answer. Well, that was also true of malaria and yellow fever in America, in both cases the chemical was DDT.
DDT no longer works on bed bugs, and our culture has been contaminated with lies about DDT, so it will never be returned to our arsenal, and we have a substantial arsenal of chemistry to fight mosquitoes. But what happens when we begin to believe a malaria free society is our right, and not our responsibility? We must not forget what brought us the life we enjoy, and it didn't come about by accident, or "all natural" solutions. It came about because we effectively use large amounts of pesticides, and that's what saves lives. Florida became heavily populated after WWII because of their intense mosquito control programs, and the use of pesticides.
As I stated at that meeting, at the end of WWII the world's population was approximately two billion people, and it took thousands of years to get to that number. In less that 75 years the world's population soared to 6.75 billion, and these products were so terrible, how did that happen?
Pesticides are tools of mass survival, not destruction, and everything Rachel Carson said was either a lie, inaccurate, or speculation.
You may wish to review my DDT commentaries, my Rachel Carson file, and my entire DDT file.
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