Reader Mail: DDT

March 18, 2008

What do you do, O Reader, when the discussion just isn’t going your way? Some people bow out gracefully, others concede a point or two, and others try and shift their angle of attack. Apparently, however, if you’re Ed Darrell, you abandon all pretense of rational discussion and fling a little mud.

Your nearly impossible to read comments box, your not posting remarks unedited by you, and your intransigence in repeatedly posting “citations”from the avoiwed liar suggest this is not the place to carry on a discussion.

I had hoped you’d bother to read what I wrote, and follow my links, after I followed yours and was so sorely disappinted.

Milloy is a liar. You obviously have never bothered to try to track down his citations — they can’t be tracked. Those aren’t citations. They are primates flinging feces.

Alas.

If anyone has a question as to whether or not I post remarks unedited by me, I’ll be more than happy to provide the original emails that arrived in my inbox. I sometimes — very occasionally — correct spelling mistakes in what arrives, but only if the error is egregious and would serve only to embarrass the sender. But apart from those rare instances, what I display for the Reader in these postings is the unedited text of the original message that I receive. The only parts of the message which get redacted are the sender’s email address, IP address, and ISP information.

And as I say, I have backup copies of all the original emails to prove that with, which I can easily display upon request.

As to the complaint about the contact form being a bit hard to read — well, it’s not hard for me to read, and nobody else has yet complained. But the colour palette is a bit narrow, and for what it’s worth I’ve tracked down the relevant bits of and made a few modifications — textarea and input backgrounds are now darker, and the text is the same gold colour as the hyperlinks.

There, that sets aside Ed’s form criticisms. Now, let’s look again at a more serious charge that he makes.

Just for fun, I went through the list of DDT factoids at Junk Science to see how easy it would be to verify some of the citations. Selecting citations at random, I tried to cross-reference them against Internet-available sources. Some of the older citations, I would have had to visit a library with a comprehensive database of old journals to obtain (and my ability to access the University of Alberta’s online journal services have been revoked due to my no longer being a student of that institution).

Others, however, were more easily tracked down. Here’s a handful of examples from the list of references that could be demonstrated as being accurate citations from works published in medical or scientific journals.

Now, all I’m doing by listing these here is demonstrating that it is Ed, currently, who can be shown conclusively to be a liar. Whether Steven Milloy is a liar or not is still up for discussion — certainly, Ed is convinced that Milloy is a liar of epic proportions, while I remain agnostic on the matter. But the above list demonstrates, conclusively, that Ed’s earlier statements (i.e. that no serious scientific publications have carried articles disputing ’s theories or the conclusions published in her book , and that Milloy’s citations can’t be tracked) are falsehoods.

To be clear: based on the above, it can be said now that Ed Darrel has been conclusively demonstrated to be a liar.

I have read a sampling of content at Ed’s site, and admittedly do enjoy some of his content (his commentary on Galileo — and the generally good relationship between and — is very reasonable, for example). And I would even go so far as to charitably suggest that he makes a convincing case for a multi-vectored solution to the problem of malaria; his advocacy for s is, I think, important (even if mosquito nets are an incomplete solution, as anyone with sufficient backcountry camping experience should know), and both passive and active methods of preventing s from reaching humans will be necessary in eradicating from the world.

To be completely fair, I’m no advocate for rampant use of any potentially toxic substance, but I do believe in using what works to solve a problem. worked in many countries; we should still consider it a valid part of the arsenal of methods we should employ in our efforts to eradicate malaria world-wide, especially since many of the effects it supposedly has — on humans and on avian species — have since been cast into doubt*. That’s not to say that DDT is the only weapon we should use in our struggle against this disease. But neither should we disallow its use as we have — millions have died for that mistake.

* And that would be another lie Ed is guilty of — his assertion that none of Rachel Carson’s conclusions have been successfully disputed.

Posted by Kenneth Filed in Health, Reader Mail, Sci-Tech
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