Faces you won't see on a Sierra Club calendar.
Paul Driessen and Robert Novack, M.D.:
Fina Nantume was an orphan at the APEA Primary School in Kampala, Uganda. Here is a collage of the 50 children-- Fina's classmates-- who died from malaria at the APEA school in 2005.
Environmentalism has consequences.
Paul Driessen and Robert Novack, M.D.:
Fina’s little body shook for hours with teeth-chattering chills. The next day her torment worsened, as nausea and vomiting continued even after there was nothing left in her stomach. Finally, her vomiting ebbed and chills turned to fever, drenching her body in sweat. Then more chills, fevers, nausea, convulsions, and constant, unbearable pain in every muscle, bone and joint.
She cried out, and tears mixed with sweat. But no one could help her. She had no money for doctors, medicines or a hospital room. She didn’t even have a mother or father to comfort her. All the orphanage school staff could do was caress her, pray and hope she’d get better – and wait for her to die.
And in agony that never stopped from the time the malaria first struck her down, Fina Nantume did die. So did 49 of her classmates, out of 500 students in the APEA Primary School for orphans in Kampala, Uganda, in 2005. Most of the survivors were also afflicted with malaria at least once that year. Some became permanently brain damaged. Others died in subsequent years.
Fina didn’t have to die. None of these spirited, beautiful young students had to die. None of them had to get malaria. The disease is preventable, treatable and curable.
Then why did they? Why does half the world’s population remain at risk of getting malaria? Why are some 250 million people infected annually – with 90% of the agonizing chills, fevers, nausea, brain damage and death occurring in sub-Saharan Africa?
It’s said malaria is a disease of poverty, and poor countries don’t have enough funds,doctors or medicines to treat the disease – or prevent it in the first place. True enough. But malaria is also, and much more so, a disease of callous, intransigent environmental extremism and wanton disregard for human life. A disease whose prevention is hampered, and actively thwarted, by pervasive opposition to mosquito-killing insecticides, and mosquito-repelling DDT...
The “net” effect of these bald-faced lies is that anti-pesticide zealots are perpetuating poverty, misery, disease and death in malaria-endemic regions all over the world. Safe in offices made malaria-free by the very chemicals, technologies and prosperity they deny to others, these baby killers and their financial benefactors are violating the most basic human rights of people in poor nations: the right of access to technologies that enhance and safeguard life.
Paul Driessen is a policy advisor for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and for the Congress of Racial Equality. He is author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power- Black death.
Dr. Robert Novak is a professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who has devoted much of his life to combating malaria.
Fina Nantume was an orphan at the APEA Primary School in Kampala, Uganda. Here is a collage of the 50 children-- Fina's classmates-- who died from malaria at the APEA school in 2005.
Environmentalism has consequences.
Food for thought:
ReplyDeleteThis week we publish surprising and, on the face of it, disturbing findings. According to Christopher Murray and colleagues at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle, there were 1·24 million deaths (95% uncertainty interval 0·93—1·69 million) from malaria worldwide in 2010—around twice the figure of 655 000 estimated by WHO for the same year.
The Lancet (4 Feb 2012)
Conservatives remedy for poor countries lack of funds, doctors, and Medicines? More DDT!
ReplyDelete-KW
So your solution is to spend money on physicians and drugs to treat a preventable, often deadly, disease?
DeleteGee whiz, that's brilliant! You didn't think that up all by yourself, did you?
@KW:
Delete[Conservatives remedy for poor countries lack of funds, doctors, and Medicines? More DDT!]
Actually, conservatives are much more charitable than liberals. And DDT and similarly effective pesticides and repellents are desperately needed in areas in which insect-borne diseases are endemic.
And a large fraction of the "funds, doctors and medicines" that poor people recieve come from Christian charities-- Protestant and Catholic Charities.
Right, KW. Why would anyone imagine that I care about children's health?
DeleteA hateful person like you, why indeed? Every time you bring it up your point is "don't listen to environmentalists" Yet it's beyond a shadow of a doubt that environmentalists pushing environmental regulation have done far more to help children’s health than they have to harm it. Like I said, you don't give a shit.
Delete-KW
-KW
[Yet it's beyond a shadow of a doubt that environmentalists pushing environmental regulation have done far more to help children’s health than they have to harm it.]
DeleteAny facts to support your bizarre assertion?
Greenies would have to save a lot of kids to atone for the tens of millions of deaths from DDT hysteria, and the hundreds of millions snuffed by overpopulation psychosis.
How many kids are saved by yuppies drinking tall lattes in recycled cups?
An ad from the greentards, doing it 4 the children...
Deletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zLpfNnGMxM
Unless you’re prepared to argue that lead, mercury, PCBs, combustion exhaust, and the myriad of other substances regulated by the EPA have no effect on children, I can’t believe you really need evidence that environmentalists help children. You may be a good doctor, but it certainly looks like big parts in the front of your brain shut down when your mind turns to religion and politics (and science, but for you, that‘s really just part of religion and politics).
Delete-KW
There are many fine and sensible environmental regulations that have been of benefit to us all.
DeleteThe radical environmentalist movement is not about clear air in Los Angeles or clean water in the Hudson River. That's just common sense, and endorsed by a vast spectrum of the public, most of whom have nothing to do with radical environmentalism.
The radical environmentalist movement today is a pagan religion, characterized most distinctly by its anti-humanism, which is quite explicit and emphatic. The overpopulation nuts, the pesticide hysterics, the anti-fossil fuel wackos, the global warming frauds and loons are a movement far beyond clean air and water.
Radical environmentalists have much blood on their hands-- several hundred million aborted girls and dead kids from malaria and people in crushing poverty impeded by crazy environmentalist constraints on growth--. Radical environmentalists are an enormous danger to humanity-- perhaps the greatest danger we face.
Watch the sweet video at the link Adm. Boggs provided if you want to understand the soul of radical environmentalism. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zLpfNnGMxM)
It speaks for itself.
Just a little more FFT:
ReplyDeleteFig 2 of the Lancet paper showing malaria deaths pre- and post- Stockholm (2004) (the agreement that approved DDT for indoor spraying) can be seen here...
The 'Lancet' paper is a wealth of information concerning malaria deaths.
DeleteWere it not for Africa, malaria control would appear to be trending down to very low levels worldwide since at least 1980. The one non-African country that's not doing so well is India. And India is virtually the only country producing DDT - about 3,000 tonnes per year from memory.
Why is Africa doing so badly? For one thing, Africa was included in the malaria eradication program of the late 1950s, because it was considered too difficult. The increasing mortality rates since 1970 can't be due to the 'banning' of DDT (it wasn't and hasn't been banned) because in wasn't used in malaria control over most of the continent in the '60s in the first place.
Disruption due to civil wars and financial difficulties are probably the reasons.
Uganda has endemic malaria over most (95%) of the country with high year round transmission. It also has a high incidence of HIV infection, which reduces resistance to malaria and increases the parasite load in sufferers making transmission more likely.
Eradicating malaria by eradicating mosquitoes isn't going to work. You'd need to spray the entire country or even the entire continent with insecticides to do so, otherwise mosquitoes from other areas would just repopulate the treated areas.
Malaria control, by preventing transmission with bed nets and internal spraying of walls with DDT are the only options that have any chance of success.
I wonder if there were any factors affecting the orphanage in Kampala? Orphanages aren't usually sited in rich areas (which in malarial areas means away from mosquito infested areas). Also, why were the children orphans? Were some or even a large number AIDS orphans, perhaps with HIV infection themselves, making transmission and death due to lack of resistance more likely?
Uganda is a desperately poor country. It shouldn't be. It was described as the Pearl of Africa, but its dire situation is due to decades long mismanagement and civil war. The situation is improving slowly.
Poor people get malaria and malaria makes people poor as a vicious circle. Economic development is desperately needed to get countries such as Uganda out of poverty. But the GFC of 2008 has made the West less able to help.
@bach:
DeleteAll of these malaria eradication efforts are made much more difficult and expensive due to the environmentalist war on pesticides.
People who are dying from insect-borne diseases need real help, not ideologically motivated junk science from green loons who think that there should be less people in the Third World anyway.
Michael,
DeleteDDT hasn't been banned in malaria (and other arthropod spread diseases) despite some environmentalists' dislike of it. India produces DDT and despite this still has a high incidence of malaria.
Worries about DDT isn't junk science. It's an incredibly persistent insecticide with a half life in the environment of 11 years, which makes it very useful in internal spraying of walls for control of malaria, but an unknown quantity in the general environment.
Insisting that it has never been shown to have a deleterious effect in humans is an incredibly anthropocentric view; does it affect other species upon which humans depend directly or indirectly? Remember Diclofenac, which was used in India to treat inflammation in cattle? It was extremely toxic to vultures feasting on cattle carcasses containing trace amounts causing an almost total collapse of vulture numbers. There was then a population explosion in wild dogs with the increase in food available. And a resulting increase in the number of rabid dogs.
I don't want fewer people in the Third World (certainly not 'less people'). I just want them to be healthy, happy and able to earn a living. If that means that the rate of population growth falls towards replacement, then so be it. A high rate of population growth doesn't lead to economic development.
As an aside, I wonder about the article in your thread. I can't find any information on the APEA primary school for orphans in Kampala on the Internet, besides there being a Rivers of Joy APEA primary school which is a government school (meaning it doesn't have much money).
The report of the 2005 malaria outbreak in the orphanage was reported in your link in January 2011, and also repeated several times soon after, word for word, in religiously motivated blogs. And then again in your blog 2 years later.
I can't find any other reference to the outbreak in the Internet. Robert Novak is a very credible source - he's a well published and well credentialed medical entomologist currently at the University of South Florida. But I'm uncertain as to how much he contributed to this article.
I'm becoming progressively more skeptical about this story. It supposedly happened in 2005. The first report I can find on the Internet is the article Egnor linked to in 2011, and then it was repeated multiple times on conservative, religious or anti-environmentalist sites, word for word.
DeleteNo newspaper accounts from around the time - 2005 or 2006. Nothing.
How likely would it be that a government run orphanage with 500 children (in a desperately poor country) would have the resources to take portrait style photographs of all its children, so as a collage of the children who died could be published on the Internet?
I suspect it's a fabrication, until I can be shown better evidence. Evidence that's not on the Internet or which I haven't been able to find, though I've used multiple terms on a Google search (including getting malaria in apes from APEA primary school, malaria and 2005).
Agreed. DDT should be used in internal spraying of walls. It's been proven to be the best method of malaria control.