I mean, how long until Annie Coulter slimes her way into the fray? This one is up there with her "Darwinism-killed-more-people-than-Adolph-Hitler" braying. This one seems custom made for her schtick. And heck, she can make insults about Rachel Carson's looks and sexuality while she's at it. I mean, when you read something this bugf&ck stupid:

<<Foremost among the finger-pointers is Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who blocked bills to honor Carson and name a Pennsylvania post office for her. Coburn's Web site links visitors to Rachel Was Wrong, a site hosted by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (a free-market think tank known for, among other things, disputing evidence that human activity is driving climate change). Beside a grim photo gallery of malaria victims, the site claims "millions of people around the world suffer the painful and often deadly effects of malaria because one person sounded a false alarm. That person is Rachel Carson." >>

This is another wedge issue just waiting for the wingnuts, loonies and neanderthal dead-enders to jump on (shame on you Oklahoma for voting in this piece of shite).

It's as unfair to blame Rachel Carson for the millions of malaria deaths ostensibly caused by a banning of DDT, as it is unfair to blame Ronald Reagan for the millions of AIDS deaths resulting from his early inaction just after its discovery. I mean, if the right wants to be consistent here, they're going to have to indemnify both individuals.

But then, who ever said the right was consistent?

It just makes them angry.

right wingers are hilarious: if their "enemies" say one thing, they are FOR THE OPPOSITE no matter what. Environmentalist don't like DDT then DDT is the salvation of mankind (and especially poor people, for whom we know they have a SPECIAL concern), if Bill Clinton wants to do something about terrorism and Bin Laden, then Bush WILL DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING (and then lie about it after 9-11) This kind of mindlessness has it's advantages though, the entire right wing population can turn on a dime in perfect synchronized lock-step with never a discouraging word heard. Of course to the rest of the world all this just proves that a signifcant percentage of the American population is insane so it may not really advance their long term goals, whatever they are, much in the end.

South Africa -- one of the few African countries that could afford a spraying program without help from aid organizations -- continued to use DDT after it was banned in the United States. By 1996, South Africa reported fewer than 10,000 malaria deaths annually. That year, it switched from DDT to another insecticide. The new chemical was also sprayed to control agricultural pests, and mosquitoes quickly developed resistance to the widely used chemical. By 2000, the number of annual malaria deaths had spiked to more than 60,000.

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This paragraph is at odds with pretty much the rest of the article.

The reason why the US ban on DDT affected so many is because few African countries could afford the spraying program, and that aid comes from the US and other Western countries. Just as our present government doesn't fund health care in Africa that provides abortion, and curbs funding for groups that distribute condoms, our DDT ban affected NGOS throughout Africa.

Notice, South Africa continued to use DDT, and deaths continued to decline, until they stopped in 1996 and then the deaths shot up.

That's because DDT is exceedingly effective in controlling insects if used properly.

We've known for decades that spraying small amounts yearly inside homes would save lives, and have little impact on the environment. This wasn't done because some people refused to accept that DDT was useful, and clung to the mentality that DDT had no place in Malaria eradication.

It's foolish to prevent the distribution of condoms in Africa today, and it was foolish to block the effective use of DDT in the past. At least now we've come to our senses a bit. But make no mistake, millions died because after information was available we didn't act.

First, this isn't the usual conspiracy theory; all the documents are publicly available in the tobacco lawsuit archive.

In short, the tobacco industry had long been interested in attacking the World Health Organization, because they fear international regulation of their deadly product more than just about anything.

So in the late 1990s, Roger Bate, the founder of the astroturf (fake grassroots) group Salon quotes, "Africa Fighting Malaria", pitched his organization to the tobacco companies as a way of forcing the WHO to defend itself.

See the links from the article at:

http://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/30/ddt-tobacco-and-the-parallel-universe/

Especially the blog "Deltoid" which has long had excellent coverage of this story.

It's all such a fraud. Rachel Carson didn't oppose DDT spraying for malaria control, she favored it. The idiots in the South African government (you know, the same one that thinks HIV doesn't cause AIDS, and opposes AIDS medication) were the ones responsible, not Carson.

Predictable contrarians like Crichton and Tierney are so hilarious, because they go around acting like they've caught on to some conspiracy, when they're swallowing (and regurgitating) bucketloads of tobacco and oil company disinformation.

It's worth noting that the American bald eagle has just been removed from the endangered species list. Whereas there were only 417 nesting pairs in 1963, there are 9,789 nesting pairs as of 2006. Consequence?

How about the claim that "each year the disease infects 350 to 500 million people ".

Wouldn't that mean that the entire population of the world should have been infected several times over in the last, say 15 years?

Meanwhile, can we have the most basic journalistic standards applied before we quote people like Richard Tren, from the self created "Africa Fighting Malaria"? The fact that he admits to a link with another right-wing libertarian think-tank comes as no surprise, indeed. I checked the site and while there is a claim (sans proof) that they are far too ethical to accept funding from any sort of chemical company, there is a list of heretofore unknown foundations. Perhaps before this breezy claim of no chemical or insecticidal company funding is accepted at face value, these supposed foundations should be investigated?"

Because, frankly, it's difficult to imagine who would have funded such organizations if not those who stood to profit from such inane claims that all of the science that has been widely peer-reviewed, and accepted, is somehow now bogus.

The criticism of Carson is especially grotesque considering the fact that she died of breast cancer. Even if she was wrong about DDT and cancer (and the case isn't exactly closed on that issue), she was certainly right that environmental pollution has detrimental effects on humans. Comparing her to Hitler simply because she was trying to protect others from the hell that she was going through is reprehensible and perverse.