Quotes

Quote 291 of 521

"Silent Spring" was concerned principally with the indiscriminate use
of DDT for agricultural purposes; in the nineteen-fifties, it was
being sprayed like water in the Western countryside, in an attempt to
control pests like the gypsy moth and the spruce budworm. Not all of
Carson's concerns about the health effects of DDT have stood the test
of time--it has yet to be conclusively linked to human illness--but
her larger point was justified: DDT was being used without concern for
its environmental consequences. It must have galled Soper, however, to
see how Carson effectively lumped the malaria warriors with those who
used DDT for economic gain. Nowhere in "Silent Spring" did Carson
acknowledge that the chemical she was excoriating as a menace had, in
the two previous decades, been used by malariologists to save
somewhere in the vicinity of ten million lives. Nor did she make it
clear how judiciously the public-health community was using the
chemical. By the late fifties, health experts weren't drenching fields
and streams and poisoning groundwater and killing fish. They were
leaving a microscopic film on the inside walls of houses; spraying
every house in a country the size of Guyana, for example, requires no
more DDT in a year than a large cotton farm does.

The Mosquito Killer, by Malcolm Gladwell
		   The New Yorker, July 2, 2001
		   http://gladwell.com/2001/2001_07_02_a_ddt.htm

Tags: publichealthcommunity gypsymoth nineteenfifties environmentalconsequences cottonfarm humanillness silentspring economicgain agriculturalpurposes ddt healthexperts healtheffects testoftime moth groundwater pests malaria vicinity countryside warriors