[Buck Williams]

The villages have crops, do they not? If you sprayed DDT in a village then you would have to spray the crops too. Eating DDT probaly wouldn't help the villages much.

[Demosthenes]

It would be far worse because DDT seeping into groundwater will affect THE ENTIRE GLOBE! Did you know that one of the animals most greatly affected was, in fact, the American Bald Eagle? The eggs of the bird became soft and weak because of the defects caused by DDT. How would it feel to have that as a natinal animal and say, "Whoops! We killed it."?

Personally Creeper I would like to see your evidense for this and how it was determined that DDT caused the weakening of the eggshells. Further, if indeed this is so...Then it seems to me a decesion has to made about which we care about more...the humans who would be able to avoid more malaria or these eagles?

I, for one, choose the humans.

[Classical Liberal]

http://pops.gpa.unep.org/14ddt.htm

Humans:

* environmental oestrogen and antiandrogen effects on foetuses and breast feeding infants.
* Decreased fertility.
* Still births, neonatal deaths and congenital defects among children of chronic exposed workers. (WFPHA, 2000).

Birds and mammals:

chronic exposure:

* estrogenic properties and antiandrogenic sexual development feminization of males (alligators and Florida panthers).
* Eggshell thinning of offspring. (WFPHA, 2000).

Still not convinced about the problems with DDT? If you choose the humans, don't use it because...

Humans:

single doses from 6 to 10 milligrams:

* nausea, headaches, diarrhoea, irritation of the mucous membranes, tremors and convulsions, nervous system abnormalities. (WHO, 1979; WFPHA, 2000).

Let me also reiterate that it will get into the ground water and circulate around the whole globe. I choose the humans too. It will be more beneficial if we find another way to deal with the malaria problem. The use of DDT would fix the malaria in the short run, but over time the DDT would be bad for the environment and thus for us.

[Noumenon]

This was in my first post:

But most importantly, DDT is also not hazardous to humans or the environment -- despite all the propaganda to the contrary. According to tests conducted by Dr. Philip Butler, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service's Sabine Island Research Laboratory, "92 percent of DDT and its metabolites disappear" from the environment after 38 days. (See Environmental Protection Agency's DDT hearings transcript, page 3,726.) Plus, humans have nothing to worry about small exposures to DDT.

"DDT is so safe that no symptoms have been observed among the 130,000 spraymen or the 535 million inhabitants of sprayed houses [over the past 29 years of its existence]. No toxicity was observed in the wildlife of the countries participating in the malaria campaign," said the WHO director in 1969. "Therefore WHO has no grounds to abandon this chemical which has saved millions of lives, the discontinuation of which would result in thousands of human deaths and millions of illnesses. It has served at least 2 billion people in the world without costing a single human life by poisoning from DDT. The discontinuation of the use of DDT would be a disaster to world health."

And I find your argument that DDT will contaminate the entire globe if its sprayed on a few African villages completely ludicrous. You're gonna allow millions of people to die EVERY YEAR for the sake of some crackbrained theory that sounds like you just made it up?

The villages have crops, do they not? If you sprayed DDT in a village then you would have to spray the crops too. Eating DDT probaly wouldn't help the villages much.

See above. I don't know whether they sprayed crops before DDT was banned, but either way, the villagers were not poisoned.

[Classical Liberal]

And I find your argument that DDT will contaminate the entire globe if its sprayed on a few African villages completely ludicrous.

It's not ludicrous, it's science. Water circulates around the globe.

[^_^]

It would be far worse because DDT seeping into groundwater will affect THE ENTIRE GLOBE! Did you know that one of the animals most greatly affected was, in fact, the American Bald Eagle? The eggs of the bird became soft and weak because of the defects caused by DDT. How would it feel to have that as a natinal animal and say, "Whoops! We killed it."?

Personally Creeper I would like to see your evidense for this and how it was determined that DDT caused the weakening of the eggshells.

DDE interferes with calcium transport, resulting in eggshell of poor quality (link).

We had a food crisis here a few years ago. Newly hatched chickens fell dead in mass numbers. Other animals and humans didn't have any issues. So the food supplies were checked. And the food was contaminated with PCB's, a class of chemicals that contain chlorinated phenyl groups. DDT ( DichlorDiphenylTrichloroethane ) is related to ( Poly Chlor Biphenyls ). It's not part of the class, but it also contains these chlorinated phenyl groups.

other link: DDT is claimed for being responsible for alligators' reproductive failure. That's another animal that produces eggs.