As usual, a myopically oversimplified static assessment of a highly complex dynamic problem.
Guess what the result of that will be...
An exerpt from an article in the JMVH (Journal of Military and Veterans Health) of the Australasian Military Medicine Association.
My
emphasis added.
"DDT is neither a panacea nor a super villain. In many places
DDT failed to eradicate malaria not because of environmentalist restrictions on its use but because it simply stopped working. Carson showed that insects have a phenomenal capacity to adapt to new poisons; anything that kills a large proportion of a population ends up changing the insects’ genetic composition so as to favour those few individuals that manage to survive due to random mutation. In the continued presence of the insecticide, susceptible populations can be rapidly replaced by resistant ones."
In fact, if I remember correctly, DDT resistance and the subsequent decline in effectivness against malarial mosquitoes was noted even before its use became widespread.
"
By 1972, when the DDT controls went into effect in the United States, nineteen species of mosquitoes capable of transmitting malaria, including some in Africa, were resistant to DDT. Genes for DDT resistance can persist in populations for decades. Spraying DDT on the
interior walls of houses led to the evolution of resistance half a century ago. In fact, pockets of resistance to DDT in some mosquito species in Africa are already well documented. There are strains of mosquitoes that can metabolize DDT into harmless by-products and other mosquitoes have evolved whose nervous systems are immune to DDT. There are even mosquitoes that avoid the toxic effects of DDT by resting between
meals not on the
interior walls of houses, where chemicals are sprayed, but on the exterior walls, where they don’t encounter the chemical at all."
Read the full article here
https://jmvh.org/article/ddt-and-sil...y-years-after/
And one further example of the deadly trophic cascades resulting from the
uninformed usage of such volatile agents. (kinda reminds me of releasing Zuckerburg Gates and Bezos into the
environment...)
"For instance, an experiment conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Entomology on May 23, 1945, was reported not only in scientific journals but also in general-circulation magazines. At the rate of five pounds per acre an
oil solution of DDT was sprayed over a gypsy-moth-infsted 1,200-acre oak forest near Moscow, Pennsylvania.
It was terrifyingly effective. Every gypsymoth caterpillar in the forest died within hours. But so did every bird—at least 4,000 of them within eight days. Nor was this the limit of DDT’s mischief.
Annihilation of ladybug beetles by the spraying resulted in a tremendous multiplication of aphids, which are not affected by DDT but are naturally controlled by ladybugs. The forest was on the way to being completely defoliated when rains halted the outbreak; aphids are shortlived in wet
weather."
https://www.americanheritage.com/dea...-history-ddt#2
And, despite the "worldwide ban on its manufacture", DDT is still used (and thus manufactured) fairly openly in some countries, and as an
emergency measure to control various outbreaks worldwide.
Re: Genetically Modified Mosquitoes
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