The pandemic isn't making the world any brighter. Insecticides are being sold online to treat or prevent COVID-19 -- and people are buying them. Speaking of pesticides, you probably had a healthy dose of one this morning and it's more toxic than DDT. Drink up!
DDT
One headache drug discovery chemists face is a preternaturally annoying problem called crystal polymorphism. It can kill an otherwise promising drug unless it can be fixed, and sometimes it can't. But NYU chemists discovered that DDT exists in two forms, with one better at killing bugs, which could lead to using smaller pesticide amounts.
With only my own stupidity to blame, I got into a Twitter "discussion" with an anti-DDT zealot. Big mistake. All I got was a stomach ache. Not sure what he got from it.
Mosquito season is around the corner, and there may be an extra surprise this year, depending on how Zika behaves. So, do you slop DEET all over your kids? Spray to kill the mosquitoes? Some are calling for the use of DDT. But if you're scared of chemicals, you might actually prefer DDT to DEET. Here's how they compare.
DDT being declared a carcinogenic risk to humans was a scientific anomaly, drawn entirely from high-dose animal studies. Dr. Don Roberts, Professor Emeritus of Tropical Public Health at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) in Bethesda, MD, shows that no expert review of DDT concludes that it is a human carcinogen.
The mosquito-borne Zika virus has been declared a global public health crisis by the World Health Organization, but the agency did not say how to effectively fight it. One way would be to allow widespread use of DDT, which eradicated that same mosquito during the 20th century.
A new study purports to link levels of chemical exposures to reduced response levels to bacille Calmette-Guerin vaccine in infants. The authors fail to note that simply measuring two chemicals and finding some impairment in some function does not mean that the chemicals caused it.
A recent online article attacks several Nobel Prize winners whose contributions to humanity saved many millions of lives.
A new study published in International Journal of Food Contamination shows that pesticide levels in food are far below levels that would warrant health concern.
A New York Post op-ed calls out songwriter and activist Neil Young for his misguided beliefs about sound agricultural practices, specifically his loud-mouthed (but widely heard) ignorance about GMO technology and its potential for saving lives threatened by malnutrition and nutritional deficiencies.
Over 800,000 individuals die each year from malaria, the majority of which are pregnant women and children in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, DDT has the
By any measure, malaria is one of the most ruthless threats to global human health. It has been estimated that the parasite a protozoan called Plasmodium kills one child per minute in Africa alone. While it used to take the lives of over one-million people each year, mostly sub-Saharan African infants and children, the number has been reduced substantially thanks to modern public-health efforts, to approximately 650,000. But this number is still unacceptable, and twenty-times that number are chronically ill from malaria.