Malaria and other mosquito borne diseases have cost millions of people their lives. Why, because of a ban on DDT. Jillian Kay Melchior authored an excellent article about the myths related to DDT. I have exerted key elements from her piece.
Unfortunately, alarmism has led to a decades-long ban on the most effective pesticide against the disease-spreading mosquito, even though science has proven it reasonably safe.
Mosquitoes are responsible for more deaths than any other creature on Earth. DDT kills mosquitoes most effectively; in the 1960s, the National Academy of Sciences said that “to only a few chemicals do man owe as great a debt as to DDT,” adding that it had prevented as many as 500 million deaths.
Nonetheless, the United States continues to enforce its 1972 ban on DDT, citing dubious health and environmental concerns.
Numerous studies directly contradicted environmentalists’ claims that the chemical caused cancer. Likewise, thousands of studies examining other purported health risks produced results that were “weak, inconclusive or contradictory; in other words, there is no evidence of harm,” Namibian health minister Richard Nchabi Kamwi noted in the Wall Street Journal.
Claims of damage to the environment proved equally nebulous. Rachel Carson, the environmentalist who drove the DDT ban, based her argument on several fraudulent claims.
For example, she claimed DDT had rendered the robin “on the verge of extinction” — and that same year, America’s foremost ornithologist declared it “the most abundant bird in North America,” the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons noted more than a decade ago.
Yet Carson’s junk science won out, and not just in the United States.
Latin America had nearly eliminated the Aedes aegypti mosquito using DDT in the last century. But the scaremongering that began in the United States spread south, and with it, the mosquito population surged, bringing Zika with it.
Globally, discouraged use of DDT has come at enormous human cost; Dr. Rutledge Taylor’s documentary estimated that the DDT ban could be linked to as many as 1.5 million unnecessary deaths a year.
“It’s ridiculous,” one top microcephaly expert recently told USA Today. “These guys come out of the blue, and people believe them, with no evidence at all.”
Thanks to environmentalists, mosquito – caused deaths and diseases are preventable tragedies. So, let’s start preventing them.
Jillian Kay Melchior, political editor at Heat Street, is a fellow with the Independent Women’s Forum.
The DALE YEAGER Blog 
#DDT was banned from use on farms in the U.S. Public health uses to fight the insect vectors of vector-borne diseases, like malaria and Zika, were specifically exempted from the ban.
In other words, the U.S. banned DDT from use on cotton fields in Arkansas. Exactly how would lifting that ban do anything to fight Zika? DDT has been used heavily, against Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that carries Zika, in West Africa and South America. The mosquitoes are resistant and immune to DDT.
How about we stop blaming forward-thinking environmentalists, who were right about DDT AND have cut malaria deaths by 90%, and join to work to defeat Zika?
See: EPA keeps DDT available to fight disease
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DDT from the 1950s and 1960s is STILL killing songbirds in Michigan, and condors in California.
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