Still Lying About DDT

Fifty years after Wisconsin banned the single most effective mosquito killer, Little Local Pravda continues to lie about DDT.

...After suffering from a range of forces, including the effects of DDT and other chemicals that caused eggs to thin and reduced eaglet production, the species has rebounded in Wisconsin in recent decades....

The facts of the matter?

...The Fish and Wildlife Service examined every bald eagle found dead in the U.S. between 1961-1977 (266 birds) and reported no adverse effects caused by DDT or its residues.

One of the most notorious DDT "factoids" is that it thinned bird egg shells. But a 1970 study published in Pesticides Monitoring Journal reported that DDT residues in bird egg shells were not correlated with thinning. Numerous other feeding studies on caged birds indicate that DDT isn't associated with egg shell thinning.

In the few studies claiming to implicate DDT as the cause of thinning, the birds were fed diets that were either low in calcium, included other known egg shell-thinning substances, or that contained levels of DDT far in excess of levels that would be found in the environment -- and even then, the massive doses produced much less thinning than what had been found in egg shells in the wild....

Well, what of it?  Who cares about one chemical in Wisconsin?

... Bis(4-chlorophenyl)-1,1,2-trichloroethane (DDT) has been shown, over the past sixty years, to be one of the few affordable and effective tools against malarial vector mosquitoes, which account for over 300 million cases of disease and more than 1 million deaths every year....

Malaria cares!  

The point in this post is NOT to launch a campaign for DDT.  The point is that what you read in the "news" ain't necessarily so, and the "news" will keep up its lying as long as they're around.