Silent Spring
Looking at my carrots as I pulled a bunch today reminded me of pulling perfect roots from the sandy soil of Hampshire in the late 40s. Mine have been lightly attacked by the carrot fly which have spoiled that vision of perfection.
The 1940s was well before Carson published Silent Spring which effectively drove DDT off the market. I wonder if any other book has been responsible for so many deaths, and deaths predominately in what we now call The Third World. Malaria was on the ropes before DDT was proscribed, but without DDT it kills more and more each year. Not that the fault lies at the author's door alone; it lies particularly at the doors of those who being in power were convinced by the arrant nonsense of the book. What is it with politicians that they are so easily swayed by the half baked opinions and worst case scenarios of Enviromental Zealots
By the way, I wonder if it is possible for mosquitos, as they go about their blood sharing activities, to spread other blood borne diseases, such as HIV/Aids. If it is possible, then the book has been even more deadly than I realised.
I don't think it has ever been demonstrated that DDT harmed anyone, but it certainly saved a lot of lives. It would also return my carrot patch to the quality of the ones I ate raw in 1949. After rubbing them on my corduroy trousers of course.
Comments
I copied this from the website of The Centre for Disease Control, looks like you don't need to get too concerned about catching HIV from your carrot fly:
The results of experiments and observations of insect biting behavior indicate that when an insect bites a person, it does not inject its own or a previously bitten person's or animal's blood into the next person bitten. Rather, it injects saliva, which acts as a lubricant so the insect can feed efficiently. Diseases such as yellow fever and malaria are transmitted through the saliva of specific species of mosquitoes. However, HIV lives for only a short time inside an insect and, unlike organisms that are transmitted via insect bites, HIV does not reproduce (and does not survive) in insects. Thus, even if the virus enters a mosquito or another insect, the insect does not become infected and cannot transmit HIV to the next human it bites.
There also is no reason to fear that a mosquito or other insect could transmit HIV from one person to another through HIV-infected blood left on its mouth parts. Several reasons help explain why this is so. First, infected people do not have constantly high levels of HIV in their blood streams. Second, insect mouth parts retain only very small amounts of blood on their surfaces. Finally, scientists who study insects have determined that biting insects normally do not travel from one person to the next immediately after ingesting blood. Rather, they fly to a resting place to digest the blood meal.
Posted by: Angela | September 23, 2006 8:08 AM