"It is inconceivable, unconscionable and reprehensible that the European Union would put its fear of pesticides above the lives of innocent Ugandan mothers and
children," the Congress of Racial Equality’s Cyril Boynes, Jr. said today. "But that is exactly what is happening. EU charge’ d’affaires Guy Rijcken’s vile threat is an abuse of his authority and a serious human rights violation. The Government of Uganda should immediately review his diplomatic credentials."
"For Rijcken and the European Union to equate this devastation with ‘detectable’ levels of DDT in soils, birds or mother’s breast milk is absurd," Boynes said. "For them to suggest that an impoverished country like Uganda should monitor and test all its produce, in case some might have minuscule traces of DDT — to assuage Europeans’ fears of chemicals — is incomprehensible."
The story has been around for a while, but The Canadian Free Press does a great job of picking up an interesting wrinkle on it - the one that's using trade restrictions to kill Africans with European moral vanity about DDT.
It's been long known that the benefits of DDT to reliveing human misery greatly outweigh the risks, and that the US EPA data on the banning of DDT came from the evidence of 4 deat birds. More than 1 billion birds die every year in the US, and virtually all of these are a natural death where they're surrounded by their loved ones...
Annually, around 300 million people get Malaria, and it kills between 1 000 000 and 1 500 000 people per year.
To illustrate the harm the banning of DDT has done to mankind, take a look at this. More background available here. Beyond the devastation of malaria on the world's poor, it also figures into the rapid spread of West Nile virus in North America. Without DDT in their toolkit, public health bodies will have a very hard time eliminating this deadly disease.
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