The DDT ban gets questioned by both Instapundit and Forbes.  Anyone who has traveled and worked to a country with malaria knows the havoc the DDT ban has caused. Limited use of DDT to spray swamps and vertical surfaces (where fed mosquitoes rest) was never tried. Instead it was totally banned despite the supposed llophole for developing nations. Long term effects of that ban and the costs of it were never considered. The return of the predatory bird populations, whose decline was blamed on DDT, was never studied to see if it was more related to habitat loss and other factors. Having worked in college with Osprey nesting sites, there were a lot of things that affect those populations. However, Carson's book created an emotional response that drowned out science and rational thought for a feel-good self-righteousness with the battle cry: "Pesticides are bad and must be banned."

The fullest effect falls on the poorer countries and less developed nations. The major supporters of the ban come from northern climates where malaria isn't a problem. Even in places in the US where it is an issue, like South Florida and Houston, we're rich enough to look at alternates. They don't work well enough, and as the Everglades drainage stops, we are seeing malaria again. However, like measles and chickenpox which kill people in less developed countries, we can treat those cases. Not so in other countries...

We've taken the tool that made Panama livable and the canal build-able and tossed it away. Likewise, in the name of food safety, Europeans have driven a ban on genetically altered rice, which supplies needed vitamins to third world kids. After all, they don't need that rice - just some kid with rickets does. In the US, the animal rights people attempt to prevent both the type of medical research that made childbirth safe, that allows diabetics to live, and that stopped polio from crippling kids, as well as the farming that made high protein food easily available. We may have an obesity problem but you don't see starving people lining the streets here.  I'll take the fat people over starving ones any day, thank you.

Like a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle, which sure seems to cost more than eating meat here in Texas, the interesting thing to me -well, one of them really - is that its the well-to-do that can afford to say no DDT, no golden rice, no vaccinations.  Poor countries could control malaria with DDT but we won't make it and sell it. Golden rice is a choice for Europeans who can eat well, but those kids in poor countries where rice is the major food the choises aren't there. This is where I start to lose it. If those kids were white Europeans or middle class Americans, would the response be different?

King Cradlemas anyone?